nosleep

My father was not a good man, I know this. But when I think of him, I first recall his warmth, his kindness, and his strength. I remember vividly watching him toil away at backbreaking labor to support us. I was amazed by the strength of his hands, and how gentle they were with me. And then my stomach drops into a pit because now I know that with those same hands, he took the lives of countless innocent people.

My earliest memory is of him. I was 4 and I was trying to convince him to let me take in a stray dog I had found wandering an abandoned lot.

“We can’t, it’d be too much trouble to lug the mutt around, we have a hard enough time with just the two of us.” He said.

“We can leave him with lots of food until we come back,” I countered.

“Dogs aren’t like people, they’re bound by instinct. If you leave a month's worth of food out for a dog it won’t ration its food out so that it can eat happily for a month, no it’ll gorge itself and eat all the food available to it, that’s its nature, its instinct. And once there’s nothing left and hunger creeps in it might go out into the world in search of a new meal, and we’ve already learned that its instinct is to consume as much as it can while it can. That’s why we’re around, to control that which is bestial.” He said, his eyes tainted with an existential melancholy.

Even now when I think about it a trickle of cold sweat crawls achingly slow down the side of my brow, he was so close to telling me the truth back then. I wondered if the possibility of passing on his burden was what caused the derailment of his life lesson.

Our life was unconventional, spent in countless cheap, dirty roadside motels as we trekked aimlessly through the states. Sometimes we slept in abandoned lots and dark parking lots and on cold nights we clung to each other, knowing that there was no one else in the world that would care for us, but us. He tried his best to provide for me and I never went hungry, even on our worst days his patience and understanding were unmatched by any man I have known sense.

The first time I suspected my father was involved in something grisly was when I was 9. He had left me alone in our motel with the TV on and a pizza box. He must have been gone for 11 hours at least, and I began to worry that something terrible happened to him. The entire week something had been off, there was a heaviness in the air, and a chill seemed to stalk us. It was the middle of a brutal summer but every enclosed space I found myself in was wicked of its heat until the very breaths I exhaled were visible. I noticed that my father was suffering from some mental fatigue, was more irritable than usual, and had a mounting nervousness that made him quick to sequester us in our hotel. He left that day saying that there was something he needed to do but promised he’d be back. But as the clock neared 1 am I was afraid that I’d never see him again.

The relief I felt when he rushed into our hotel room was short-lived when I saw the state he was in. His dark hair was disheveled, splattered with a slick substance, and his eyes were crazed. What stood out most of all was the angry red lines criss-crossing his face and neck. He told me to get my things as he quickly made his way into the shower. I did as I was told, the panicked tone of his voice infused a frenzy into my movements, and all I owned was half haphazardly thrown into my backpack. My father stepped out of the shower and as he dressed I noticed the deep scratches raked into his forearms and back, even at that age it was unmistakable. Violence.

We drove away from that motel in silence, with no alarm or danger given voice by my father. But an undeniable sense of wrongness lingered in the air, heavy and undispellable, I knew deep in the pit of my gut that we had committed some great evil. Dad however was at ease, as if some great weight had just been lifted off his shoulders, and as days passed I noticed the stalking cold had faded.