Home (Where Is My Comfort)

The gutter is falling off of the house that it happened in.  The paint on the siding is chipped and the windows are broken and cobwebbed.  The house is, for all intents and purposes, empty.  It’s not empty, though, because the ghost of what happened in those walls still lives on looping in animation frozen in that moment of violation and hopelessness.  

The small ghost of his child-self writhes and whimpers against a pain that hurts in his soul even worse than his body.  He sees himself in shapes; twisted with his legs by his ears, bent over the arm of the sofa with every thrust ironing the air out of him.  He sees himself as the doll, the toy, the object.  

He is the whore, the product, the object.  The only thing real or human about him is the flesh stretched over bones as tight as fiddle strings.  

The sensation that his body is not fully his own.  He feels like his soul is squatting somewhere abandoned and the track marks and nosebleeds are his own chipped paint, his own hanging gutter.  He is only borrowing this form until something else decides to use it, and then he floats up into a cotton-candy sunset and the advertisement jingles for toys he would never play with.

The man who hurt him is long gone now, but instead of absence he is omnipresent.  His abuser becomes the house itself, snagging nails ripping clothing and the dripping of a faucet that hasn’t received fresh water in a decade.  He exists in the whispers of wind in one broken window and out another

He still feels the thick, inky handprints.  He sees the stains form on his hips, on his throat, shadows tightening to strangle him.  The swirls of fingerprints are burned into his skin.  He feels the phantom limbs entwining with his own.  He feels the sun’s hot breath on the back of his neck and the stench of a throat filled with beer burps.  He feels the cold of his pajama bottoms being pulled down in the night.  

He feels hands playing his ribs like a xylophone.  He is the instrument.  He is the crying boy.  He is the monster under his childhood bed, with whom he would silently beg “Eat my step-father, please eat my step-father”.

Why did he come here?  Closure?  This house takes the arthritic hands of broken gutter to rip him open anew.  He stares into a cavity in his chest.  He sees a small bird where his beating heart should be.  It is fresh-hatched wet and caws for a mother’s regurgitation.  He wishes there was something in his stomach other than bile to feed the weakening bird with.  The bird is dying.  The bird will not fly.  Exposed to the light, it begins to shrivel.  

Some horrible tentacle winds around his leg, anchoring him to the spot.  It climbs his skinny limbs and forces inside of him, snaking through intestines and he feels like it felt to be six years old pinned under some foul-smelling monster for money to put into his mother’s arm.  It roots deep inside of him, climbing upward.  He is sure he can hear the volume of the television being turned up, the jubilant bells of game show contestants bringing home the grand prize.

He is crying.  A man has won a car.

The tentacle makes its way out of his mouth and pulses against his gag reflex.  He wretches, and feels the tentacle come out further, so he falls to his knees and in long, braying gags, he spits up a shit-covered snake that immediately retreats into the piles of leaves and dead shrubbery in the unkempt garden, offering no answers.

He beats his fists on the front door.  He wants his step-father to come back from the grave and answer the door so that he can put the man back in the ground himself.  He wants his mother to answer the door with an embrace and an act like she doesn't know anything is wrong.  He wants her to fix him dinner while he stares at the clock, guts turning over, knowing what will happen after bedtime.  

He wants bedtime to come because this time, he promises himself, he will fight back.  He made that promise a thousand times but now as a man he knows he could go through with it.  He spent so many nights with kitchen knives under his pillow, but still only bit the fabric when the time came to use it.  He wishes his step father were still alive so he could put every single knife in their kitchen into him.

He feels the phantom of his step-father and all he can come up with is to ask, to be, to weep, “Why did you do that to me?  I was so little.  I couldn’t stop you.”

He chokes on his own snot.

“I just wanted a dad.  I just wanted to be our son.”

But he hadn’t been a son at all, unwillingly drafted into the role of lover when his mother failed to satisfy the brute.  He would go to the playground and see real fathers with real children, playing catch or learning to use the jungle gym, and he would wish that one of those fathers would see him sitting lonely and say, “He there, boy, you look like you need a family, come be part of ours” and they would load him into a minivan and give him a bedroom where he didn’t spend the whole night watching the door.

Not that watching the door had ever helped him.  He wondered where the compulsion came from, as if he could hold the door closed with psychic powers.  As if seeing it coming would stop it.  As if he could pay enough pain in the anticipation that the act would simply pass over him.

He sways in the angry scent of accelerant that pollutes the clean morning air.  He strikes the match and throws it down on the front porch.  There is a “whoosh” as it all goes up.  He imagines his baby pictures curling and burning.  Other pictures in the attic turned to ash, evidence erased forever. He imagines his childhood teddy bear smoldering, wondering what it did so wrong to be discarded in this way, calling out to him for salvation.  But no cries for salvation from that room had ever been answered, and it won't start now.