The Aftermath
It was still. The air was thick, like the barometric pressure had just dropped. Charged with electricity the space in between people could burst into flames. It did burst into flames. And burnt the house down and took with it the teetering sense of normalcy that should have tipped long ago. Mom was frantically on the phone to me. It had just happed. And after much moaning and tears and violent shouts and door slams, Mom was on the phone moaning to me. Could I please come home, now? What she had envisioned had come true. Please come home. Leave my long-weekend retreat to escape the family trials and come home. Leave the massage and reflexology and having my future told by a woman who pulled ideas out of my right ear and please come home. When I heard the news, more thick air and unable to breathe, I got into my Toyota Corolla and zoomed. Home. I called my friend Ben and moaned to him about how an awful thing had happened. Later, six months later, we’d go together, me and Ben, to visit him in prison.
She was only nine. It was called a crime of opportunity. As we sat in the courtroom, everybody present, my head hung in shame as if I had done it. If I could have crawled into the courtroom bench and burrowed my way through the wood, eating wood and shitting it out like a termite, I would have been a termite that day. So far away from the complete implosion, destruction, disintegration of a family, families, a life irreparably damaged. Thank God my Dad was dead as this would have killed him. His already weakened heart, two heart attacks, two major surgeries and then this news about his first born son. I heard a story about a beached whale on some shore. Thousands of pounds and dead. Too costly to lift with a crane so they just packed it full of explosives and pushed detonate. Piece of Dad sent flying, to be picked at by birds.
In the evening before being taken to prison, I crashed at his place. I had a dream that he was in quicksand. Had always been in quicksand. That he would be breathing quicksand forever.