Lacerations or Hot Rubber

I didn’t want to walk into her work looking like I did. I hopped her fence and fell asleep under the trampoline.

I woke up sweating from the heat of the black rubber. I found a corner of the yard and threw up. Under a palm’s short shade, I went through my bag and found my Walkman far at the bottom. I played my music until my batteries went dead. I thought of ways to get my four hundred and sixty-two dollars back from my father, though I knew it was spent already. I laid my head on a pillow of shirts and closed my eyes. Since the sudden death of my mother, he was bound for what he did. The pain of his chemical life was easier for him than dealing with his guilt for treating her like dirt, for ignoring her. Only thing was he still had a son. I wanted to hate him but I couldn’t. I thought about my mother reading her Bible from her chair under the big lamp. She was with the faith but never once pushed it on us. I thought about the old man now, a husk of waste on the floor, while I tasted my vomit and blood. My throat grew thick with bile and I leaned to my side and let it go on the grass. The Sun reached through gaps in the palms and gripped my swollen eye. It burned with tears but my eyelid wouldn’t open for anything. I covered my brow with a shirt and remembered back to my old life, to my mother reading the word, and my head burned beneath the sky that was once full with stars, which was now bright with sickness while I tried to breathe. All of nature’s passions spent, all of her God’s forgotten grace descended and rotting, the failure of His plan and the bloody tears of war-torn angels. All the mysteries of children lacerated.