Red Boots

"Luka, Sophie, get inside! Come up here now, and get the hell inside!" Megan screamed from the second floor of the apartment complex. Her voice rang out into every open window. Every nosy neighbor peeked out from behind car doors and window curtains to watch what melodramatic scream fest would occur tonight.

Megan's fingers were deeply embedded in the faux leather of her wheelchair armrest. She had screamed and strained like this so much lately that the white foam was starting to ooze out from the armrest. Her throat tickled with a constant storm from all the belting. She watched, red, from the top of her stairwell at the multiple neighbors staring with hate up at her as her children slowed their playful pace and turned with rotten sourness towards their mother's voice.

Her two children, Luka and Sophie, rolled their eyes at their embarrassing mother's squealing and slowly ambled in from the parking lot up the wooden steps to the complex. They had watched their mother, who was already uninterested in them, fall seemingly downward into a black chasm they had not the mind nor imagination to understand.

"How many times do I have to tell you two? Stay inside when I ask you to! Do you think I am a joke? I have one foot, and you have to use it against me?"

The two children snuck quick glances at the bandaged stump on the edge of their mother's leg. It was a hideous thing, an embarrassment, a ghost that haunted them with the bulking taunt of the wheelchair that didn't fit through any pf their apartment's doorways. It was a "diabetic amputation," mom had said, something they'd all have to help her with.

"Mom, all you do is scream at us! We were just going outside to play with the other kids, I—" Sophie tried to say.

"I clothe you, feed you, give you a place to sleep, and here, in the hardest days of my life," Megan screamed back at her daughter as she raised her stub of a foot, "you think you can just walk all over me? You know I can't go downstairs to watch you. You have to stay up here!" Megan's voice rang out like amplified incantations from hell.

Luka jumped up and down, unable to brace for his mother's anguish. He wriggled with impatience and slumped to the floor, screaming and crying. "BUT—AH, ah—It's so nice out!" he screamed.

"KNOCK IT OFF! KNOCK IT OFF, YOU'RE SUCH A JUMPY, SHAKEY BRAT!" Megan wheeled over to Luka the best that she could and grabbed a handful of her four-year-old son's shirt. She lifted him up. "Get up! Go to your room!"

Luka hit his mother's fleshy hand and jumped away. He then bolted to his room. He went to his toy bucket and took his hand-me-down, worn-out toys. He started hurling them at his mother, flailing the action figures with as much force as he could at her. The toys landed all over the apartment.

Megan raised her arm to block the hurling plastic, but as she began to disjointedly wheel over to the bedroom, Luka slammed his bedroom door shut. Trying to retain some semblance of authority, she yelled, "Good, you brat, now go to bed!"

Sophie, who had watched her mother in horror, sick of this constant chaos, looked at Megan. The girl's brown eyes, the color of Springtime mud puddles, grimaced at this thing in the wheelchair she was forced to call "Mom."

"Sophie, help me clean up your brother's mess," Megan said in a warning, brutal tone.

"You're an ogre," Sophie said, tears swelling in her eyes, "I hate you!" she whispered with soft breath. As the little girl whispered it, it became a realization that she was only just capable of articulating. A feeling that finally had a name. "AN OGRE!" She yelled.

Sophie then turned and walked towards the room she shared with Luka.

Megan watched her daughter disappear behind the cheap wooden door. It slammed. To her surprise, her two children remained silent on its other side. The July sun began to sink in the early evening, humidity drenching the pores of Megan's forehead. The silence was shell-shocking, it was an iron hammer blow to the early summer evening.

Megan turned her chair around and felt the gaze of dozens of dead, miniature eyeballs scattered across the living room. Plastic army men and Barbies and knights with old dog bites and skid marks were scattered across the room from Luka's tantrum. The phantom foot beneath Megan's stump itchily screamed to be scratched.

"He's such a little baby," she said under her breath, cursing the fact she had been stuck with these two kids. These people that she only found love for when they were silently sleeping.

Megan scratched her stump and then struggled to roll through the living room and bend down to pick up the toys. She saw the glimmer of a plastic hand mirror underneath the coffee table. She picked it up and stared at herself. Her first thought was, "fuck, I need a cigarette," but her second thought was that some stranger was drooping back in the reflection. An empty, deflated thing bloated from poison and acid.

"I used to be so pretty," Megan said sadly to her prostate plastic audience lying amidst the brown shag carpet. "And quiet," she said, feeling the throbbing chords of her vocal box.

Next door, Doris and Beth had secretly watched their chaotic neighbors. Their eyes had snuck out from behind black curtains to watch Megan scream at Luka and Sophie.

"Can you imagine that's your mother?" Doris asked.

"Imagine the mother that that woman had. It must have been like growing up in an army barracks. All that yelling and fighting and screaming. Never doing anything right. You can tell it's all she knows," Beth said angrily.

"It's sad. It's so sad. The cycle repeats," Doris said.

"The cycle repeats," Beth confirmed.

"Since they moved in two months ago, all it's been is screaming and screaming. Horrible. I used to like living here. Maybe we should look at new apartments. What do you think?" Doris said.

"Well, it was nice that one week, like two weeks ago. When there was nobody home. Like the good old days here. But then we saw her get out of that tiny old car, and she hobbled up the steps. It was sad. Only one foot. Diabetes, I think," said Beth.

"I don't know, I think she lost her foot up one of her kids' asses," Doris snickered.

"Oh, you're horrible!" Doris laughed, "pizza for dinner?"

Megan placed the toy mirror in her lap and bent down from her chair to pick up the other scattered toys. She could only half pay attention as her eyes remained staring at her stump of a leg as she blindly grabbed at plastic toy after plastic toy.

And then, she saw two little red boots sticking out from under the skirt of the couch. She wheeled over slowly, cursing as some of the toys fell back onto the floor.

She came over to the couch and smelled the spilled coffee and soda that was eternally threaded into its fibers. She stared down at the two little red boots.

"It couldn't be," Megan said. "I forgot we even gave him this," and she reached down with pale, sweaty palms to unveil the ancient He-Man action figure.

She stared at it. She cocked her head. She remembered a voice she hadn't heard in 10 years: “Meg, take this guy, it helps when you have the troll in your head.” 

"He-Man has the power," Megan said in her humid living room.

"ESPECIALLY WHEN SKELETOR IS IN THE MIX!" she heard a voice say.

She dropped the He-Man toy and looked around. "Luka?" she whispered to no one.

"It's not Luka, it is I, HE-MAN! I HAVE THE POWER!" The voice said loudly in a handsome baritone.

"What?" Megan asked with sudden fear from the voice. "Please don't hurt me, we don't have any money. It's just me and my two kids," she looked around the room, expecting a burglar dressed in black from head to toe and the evils he might do.

"Hurt you, dear woman? I wouldn't hurt a fly, UNLESS IT WAS A FLY WHO FOUGHT FOR SKELETOR!" the deep voice said in return.

Megan looked down and stared at the faded plastic toy of He-Man. The paint on most of his body had faded into a blobby-tan. The only color remaining were his red boots.

"I remember your show," Megan said, talking to the toy. "I would watch it with my brother Brian every weekend. I remember, we had to sneak it on before…" she thought back.

"BEFORE YOUR MOTHER WOKE!" He-Man spoke in his proud confident voice.

"Who was the troll?" Megan asked the plastic, naked toy on the table, thinking of her brother's voice: “Meg, take this guy, it helps when you have the troll in your head.” 

The toy said nothing. It did not move nor speak.

"Who was the troll?" Megan asked again, grabbing the toy.

"SKELETOR WAS NOT MY ONLY ENEMY!" He-Man said again loudly. "There was Hordak, and Catra, and the Snake Men, and—"

"My mother," Megan said in a soft voice. "My mother, the troll. She would wake up, and our hearts would plummet," Megan said with the sudden gusto of memory. "Our house became a sea of eggshells. If we spoke out of turn or said the wrong thing… She'd scream. I can still smell her breath, count her black teeth."

"SHE WAS AN AGENT OF SKELETOR!" The toy said.

"And Brian gave me you, so that, even when I cried myself to sleep, I had someone to protect me from the troll. We were only safe when sleeping. That was the only safe place. When He-Man was there," Megan said, staring at the toy.

"THE TROLL WAS SCARY! BUT NO MATCH FOR HE-MAN!"

"The troll--my mother. And now…what did Sophie call me?"

"AN OGRE! NOW I WONDER IF YOU'RE AN AGENT OF SKELETOR! ARE YOU FRIEND OR FOE, OGRE?" The toy asked with its blank, colorless face.

"Luka, Sophie!" Megan said. She wheeled away from the coffee table and rolled over to her children's bedroom. She knocked, "Luka, Sophie, come out here! This toy is talking to me!" Megan listened and heard some shuffling inside the room.

The cheap door squeaked open. Luka and Sophie stared at their mother with confusion. They stared at her smile, the uneven teeth primed in a jovial pose. The kids wondered how they would be bitten.

"Come look, quick!" Megan pointed to the living room. Luke and Sophie cautiously stepped into the room and looked at the crappy plastic toy standing on the table. They had seen it a million times in the toy bucket, but never played with it.

"What is it?" Luka asked, his hopes starting to rise. The toy said nothing. It was on the coffee table, motionless. The other action figures strewn about the room.

"What is this?" Sophie asked, her lip beginning to quiver with anger at her mother. She thought they would be yelled at to clean up.

"It is I, HE-MAN! AND I HAVE THE POWER!" a deep, baritone voice rang out through the room, one that the two siblings had never heard before. It was the playful voice of their one-footed mother.

The two looked back at Megan, who had a slanted grin on her face. "I AM HERE TO FIGHT THE EVIL OGRE!" Megan belted out with a smile.

Luka giggled slightly, and he went over to one of his favorite toys that lay on the carpet. "And I am here to help you," he said with his toy Spiderman.

"And me too!" Sophie said, she then jumped onto the couch, putting her hands on her hips.

Megan wheeled over to He-Man. "I'll get you, He-Man, and your friends too. I the evil ogre!" she said in her best impression of an ogre's voice that she could muster.

Her children giggled, and Megan felt a tear begin to roll down her cheek as she saw the colorless face of He-Man slowly bend into a proud smile.

"Shut up, Doris, do you hear that? Pause the movie," Beth said. The two women from next door put their ears to the wall they shared with Megan and her children.

"What is this sound?" Doris said. "Is she torturing them? Is this the day we finally call Child Protective Services? Oh no," Doris got her phone out and began researching CPS.

"No, no, wait," Beth said. "Listen." The two women held their breath as they heard the distinct sound of children giggling with their mother. An arrhythmic harmony that could quell any fear in the world.