He

The grass tickled lightly against my ankles when I followed them into the yard. I wasn’t dressed right; I had come over directly after school that day, bypassing the measured, silent condescension that arose at the house when I told my parents where I was going. They accepted it, but only begrudgingly; I knew my dad’s disapproval hovered behind his eyes like a black veil. My mother wept for me, I was informed during one of my dad’s militaristic scoldings, but more than that she wept for us all. Because of him.

            While the sun blazed hot above us, the canopied oak and pines hung motionless in the air without the slightest stirring. Their varied appendages dappled the enclosed hillside with a cool bluish shade like bruises on the green earth. I stepped into each dark pool, watching as the lights coalesced across my sandals. “Amanda! Come over here!” He yelled. He had ingrained in me a new tendency to flinch, try as I did to control it, and my gaze shot up from the marbled shadows. He and his father stood in the shade near the perimeter of the yard, not together, never together. As fast as I dared, my feet carried me towards them.

            The basketball goal was lying in the grass face down, decrepit from disuse and the consummation with Florida’s steamy spring weather. He said he was on the crew team sophomore year, but if his stature said anything it was that he barely did that and certainly did not play any basketball either. He was overweight, his body unbalanced, hands were always scraped or burned, and his nose was too long. But I only ever noticed his nose. Rain water had filled the heavy base, it reminded me of the goal I used to have as a child, the one that sat in my own driveway: half the size and clad in primary colors, I stomped on the base in my tiny white sandals and watched as the dirty water spurted from the hole where we had lost the cap. I remembered my childish laughter.

            His father’s name was John. Soft spoken and professional. I never saw the hypocritical, oppressing, failure of a man that he always described to me. The only compliment he ever gave was saying that John wrote and performed the “I’m a Pepper” jingle and that Dr. Pepper took it and used it without compensation. If that’s true, I’ll surely never know now. John gingerly grasped the backboard of the goal, ready to lift it slowly and methodically into the air so it might tip over and land without much fuss into the grass. Slowly and methodically weren’t necessarily in his repertoire though. While John lingered at the top of the goal, he leapt onto the upturned base and grappled with the tall black post. His thick fingers clasped tightly around its circumference, his knuckles painted white with his grip. This wasn’t really my thing, usually I felt annoyed being drafted into work that wasn’t rightfully meant for me. But I knew what would happen if I didn’t help, if I stood idly by while he worked, so I placed my hands beneath the post at the center, cradling it in my feeble fingers.

            Many dark winter evenings were spent in that house. My parents didn’t always know where I was; whether I subconsciously did it for their own benefit or not, I can’t say. In that regard, my thoughts were selfish, I didn’t want to get in trouble. Hours upon frozen hours were spent outside his fort in the backyard, the one that they should have had a permit for, but they just never did. I played Pokémon on my Nintendo DS while he smoked menthols, or those random, shoddy cigarettes that he had happened to find somewhere or another. I used to think rocking in rocking chairs for a while might be romantic. I clutched his hand with wide, frantic eyes as the sweat stuck into my shirt collar after I tried the first of many burning cigar skins emptied and refilled illicitly. Never in my life had I felt such a negative disconnection from reality. It wasn’t just marijuana like he said it was, I gathered that much once I’d tried it a few more times. My feet pushed me again and again back into the chair, my exasperation coiling inside my head and consuming every passing moment in a faded vacuum. “Just hold my hands, please.” The words fell out of my mouth like they were made of lead, and he did as I asked with a smirk.

            The goal rose from the ground abruptly, his weight against the fulcrum point forcing it up like a trodden rake. Organic debris, a little Spanish moss and some clods of wet dirt, sprinkled down into my face, bringing a slight tear to my dry eyes. He paced away, the deed being done, totally oblivious of me, to attack his father for some petty conflict (all of which have blended together in my mind, their constancy so repetitive). I looked after them, brushing the dust from my short hair when I heard a sharp crack. My bicep ignited with pain and I grasped it, stifling a yelp in my throat. The backboard, blackened by mud and rot had settled once again in the grass next to me beneath the sun spots. It was split in a jagged half, the other side hung above me, still attached to the post. Peeling away my palm, my skin was revealed, raked through as though a set of bear claws had found my freckled skin due target. Smudges of dirt and mold hung on the fringes of the wounds, and I felt its inherent filth sidling along my bared blood. The pain was searing.

            “Stop it! Stop! I love you!” I said. The scene is a blur, did it really happen? I couldn’t fabricate this. So many times before, his hands had pressed against my throat in the moments of visceral conflagration, my rushing gasps speeding alongside the rivers of hot blood in the channels of my veins. His hickeys hurt sometimes, but I could cover them. I had learned how to cover them all with minimal effort, I prided myself on that. The sunlight that slid into his kitchen through the wood blinds that afternoon was a bright orange, basking the unlit room in a heated presence, like a specter. My disbelief outweighed my instincts in that moment, and he was on top of me before I felt the pressure on my neck. The tile was cold, the table was eclipsing the window, and my mouth gaped open for air. I don’t remember what he was saying. I remember the tears that streaked down across my temples and into my hair. Time didn’t exist, words I couldn’t find let alone utter. There were only hot tears and his darkened grimace above me. There was a slight wetness in his eyes too; it glimmered out of his shadowed features like a candle in the dark. I learned after all this passed that most people who are choked can die in the following 72 hours because of a crushed trachea. It makes me shiver, to this day.

He was walking back into the house, and my arm still burned beneath my palm. I looked at him, a faint yearning in my heart tugging after him like a thread, but I submerged my tears with a lumped gulp. I knew what would happen, and I knew more about what wouldn’t happen. Making sure he was out of view, I rustled over to the tall spigot which always sprayed too haphazardly. I slid up my sleeve to my shoulder and flushed out the gashes, scrubbing it with care, running my slick fingers over the reddened valleys. The water trickled down my palms, cold rivulets that enlivened my skin. I glanced over my shoulder and I was alone. Surrounded by the grasses whose tendrils reached over my head from the flowerbed, I listened to the stillness. I lifted my wet hand into the sunlight, as though it were made of glass. A bird was chirping somewhere. A quiet sigh passed my lips and I rolled my sleeve back, covering as much of the lesion as I could, I couldn’t let him see, it was another weakness for him to exploit. I walked up the hill again and slipped into the house, as the cycle recurred.