by Tew, J. D.
There was a fearsome dangling belt beside him that could make a professional wrestler let out a triumphant, ‘Oh yeah!’
The Enforcer was two and half inches wide with metal studs. I think I saw that belt holding up the leather pants of a gas thief in a post-apocalyptic movie. It wasn’t a light plastic replication of metal, either. The studs were metal, and the belt weighed at least a pound and a half.
I knew pain because I was a familiar customer. After three strikes of the dreaded belt caused mind-searing pain, my mind went numb. Shocked to my core, I could no longer absorb any further anguish from the remaining twenty blows.
As my mind reverted to fog, my dad stood tall in front of me, withdrawing the lethal belt and rolling it up with his hands. He proudly announced the terms of the grounding: a full two weeks. I stood dumbfounded, contemplating my punishment: a couple of weeks stuck in my room, and an ass I could not sit on for days.
I remember that day so well. I will never forget the look on my mother’s face as he paraded me in front of her in the living room, where she had just barely restrained herself out of dread as she heard my blood-curdling screams. My dad presented my bruises to my mother—her name was Ann.
Bill said, ‘Look at what your son got himself into today.’
He was wearing the usual black slacks from work. Above was an over-bleached, worn-out T-shirt that hugged his terrifying biceps.
The look I saw that day upon my mother’s face, I had seen before, and would observe again and again in the future. It was the wide-eyed glare of cowardice. She knew something was wrong, but was too afraid to do anything about it.
‘Go to your room, Ted!’ Ann had yelled out of anger, while my dad escorted me. I knew she was trying to pry my father away from me, but because of her fear of him, could only defer to him as the Master, in command of my release.
Dad always talked about me as if I belonged to my mother, and that he wanted nothing to do with me. Unless it was a matter of meting out physical punishment, he acted as if I did not exist. He delighted in showing my bruises to Ann, triumphantly expecting her to cower before his might. After all, I had hit a girl on her ear with a pebble. Even though I felt bad, there was no denying it was a marvelous Hail Mary pass for his inhibited frustration.
The way he marched me to my room, one would have thought I wasn’t capable of walking ten feet on my own. Alone, as I rested on my belly, I bawled my eyes out. After about ten minutes of crying, I thought about what I did.
After several more minutes, I once again became restless. Muted voices—those of boys—lassoed my attention. They sounded familiar.
I heard Jason talking outside, and I rose up to look through my window. That was the day I first saw Travis Jackson.
Travis stood taller than Jason did by at least a head’s length. He had chestnut hair and a prominent nose like a gladiator’s. I was watching from my bedroom when I saw Jason shaking Travis’s hand. I could only see the tops of their heads.
Travis was new to the Red Bricks. He moved in that day. If I was there to meet him in person, I might have known his pain from the sight of him. I would come to find out later Travis was abused by his father, like me. Travis and Jason were the same age as me, and I wanted to be a part of their instantly formed clique. Badly.
‘Welcome to the corniest place on Earth, dude,’ Jason said.
‘Is there really a lot of corn here?’ Travis snickered.
‘No, this place just sucks, but there are some cute girls who live in Century Place,’ Jason said, answering Travis’s odd query. ‘Did you see anything cool on your trip up here?’
‘Well, if you consider twenty dead armadillos on the side of the road cool. We saw a motorcycle accident. There was a dead dude and I think he was gone because they wrapped him in a bag,’ Travis answered.
‘Wow,’ Jason said. Travis excited him, and I think that is when they became pals. Travis picked up on Jason’s excitement. ‘Do you want to see my new place?’ Jason nodded his head, and they both walked toward the front door of the building.
I liked Jason, because he was intriguing. I ached to become closer friends with him. He had set fire to the plains surrounding our area before they were paved over for suburbia. Jason was bad, and that was interesting.
Jason always cuffed his pants about two inches up from his shoes and wore shirts that were stretched in the neck from being so rough with other kids. He had brown hair, and his eyes were always welcoming—even if you knew he was about to pull off a prank the next second. He had the charisma I was missing. He lived in the complex just across the drab courtyard, which was nothing but a square of parched crabgrass, really.
“I once again became aware of very distant, muted voices that sounded exactly like those a few minutes ago. These voices were emanating from through my bedroom floor, which like all the other floors and walls, was paper-thin in this crummy building. In a kneeling position, I placed my ear down on the cold surface. I could hear Travis and Jason in the apartment below! This must be where Travis’s new apartment is! Stoked about my discovery, I heard Jason carry on to Travis about his old prank in setting fire to the woods in front of our apartments.”
Water.
My mind jolts back to reality, to the present day. Without saliva, my tongue feels parched against the roof of my mouth. Sitting in this cell is bad enough; I am wasting energy telling stories to a computer. Of course, now the battery is dying. The beeping indicator notifies me repeatedly that the device will soon shut down.
“Guard. I need some water and a charger for this damn computer. Guard!”
The intercom cues up with a buzz and click. The guard says, “Step back! I said, step back!”
Beyond the view box opening, he throws a splash of water at me, and I catch it with my shirt. I am no stranger to thirst, and I don’t think twice. I wring out the water that he tossed, over my lips, and into my mouth. He tells me the device will charge when it isn’t in use. It makes sense to me.
“Get back to it, prisoner!”
Without a thought, conditioned by several months of brutality in solitary confinement, I meekly say, “Yes, sir.” I will not sass him. Prison guards are notorious for lashing out, and it is usually a group effort. My side still throbs and continues to swell from the prod. Back to it, I guess. I should get back to how this all started, but it feels good to talk about my family—yes. Tears run down my cheeks. Even with the upsetting memories swirling around in my head, I know a universal truth—a child cannot “unlove” his parents.
“It was the second to the last day of my grounding. I was still bored in bed, having re-read my adventure books for the third time. There was a beam of light entering through the window, and I was fascinated by the highlighted dust I could scatter around with my hand.”
There was a brisk smell of possibly an early frost in the air. I had my window open, and I could hear some couple outside yelling at each other at eight in the morning. They were fighting about the garbage, of all things. Apparently, she threw out his sports listing and a bottle of high fat milk that was ninety-five percent depleted anyway.
My calico cat Meghan entered the room. She hopped into my lap and kneaded my belly. There was sudden excitement on her face, because a fly had just snuck through a dime-sized hole through the mesh screen of my window. My cat went into a berserk attack mode. It was thrilling. I was cheering her on. Meghan snagged the fly with her claw, and brought it to her mouth.
‘Please no, don’t eat it whatever you do!’ I exclaimed, forgetting my dad was asleep.
She ate it. Immediately, the contents of my stomach became the contents of my throat, then mouth. I was like a bulimic squirrel. I ran toward the bathroom as fast as I could, puking with sporadic bursts on the tan apartment carpeting in the hallway, despite my hands over my mouth. Just before I reached the bathroom, I encountered an immovable force—my dad.
‘What in the hell is going on here Theodore? You are puking all over my God damn house?’ my dad asked furiously.
His face was red on the left side, probably from sleeping awkwardly, and his mustache was crinkled at the left corner of his upper lip as it twitched.
I firmly pressed my left hand against my mouth, still in a delicate state. I pointed with my right index finger to my face, with pleading eyes, and he reluctantly understood.
‘Go clean yourself up!’ he roared at me as he shoved me in the bathroom, closing the door onto me.
Gasping, I finished off my vomit in the porcelain sink. As my stomach dry heaved, I knew there was no more to come. Deadly afraid that my dad would open the door any moment, I quickly splashed water on my face and grabbed a towel to dry myself off.
My premonition proved correct. The door flung wide open as my father, out of control, grasped me by my pajamas collar. He shoved me, still maintaining a steel grip on my collar, toward the scene of the crime. Splotches of vomit still decked the hallway, plus some backsplash on the walls near the floor.
Spinning me around ferociously, he clasped his rough hands around my neck, and just like that, lifted me off the floor, my feet dangling. In that fateful moment, two lessons were branded on me like a searing cattle prod. Abuse of power was the first lesson—a familiar one he had pummeled into me several times in the past. Second—and the most fresh and damning—my dad could drain the life from my body any time he wanted. My dad wasn’t trying to strangle me. Rather, he was showing me that he held the power and that one wrong move could mean the end.
My feet were not touching the floor, and it was a good indication that the trial wasn’t over. I swallowed the rest of my puke. It tasted extremely acidic with crunchy peanut butter a la mode. Then, the balls of my feet hit the carpet, stiff in the spot where someone spilled mustard weeks before, and I realized that it was over. My dad faded into the darkness of the hallway and disappeared behind the slam of a bedroom door.
After spending the next hour trying to clean up the vomit, I set up a war game in my room. I wore myself out marshaling my anger into a fierce engagement. Mainly, the battle was between a plastic muscular commando and his army of transforming robots, versus the relentless onslaught of monochromatic green army men with baseplates. They were essential to any army or battle scene forged by the imagination of a kid.
The day crept on. When it was dark out, a sweeping series of elongated shadows intermingled on my floor, as the bright lamp on my dresser relentlessly shone through the darting miniature figures embroiled into battle.
It was now way past bedtime, and no one had yet checked on me. Exhausted yet still haywire from my war games, I retreated quickly to my blankets after I turned off the lights. I had darted across the floor as if it was sprinkled with hot coals. Once under my blanket, I hummed a popular cartoon theme song.
My eyes shuttered and slowly began to close. Just as my eyes were about to close entirely, something bizarre, shimmering with iridescence, slipped in through my window.
I sat up quickly, and the blood rushing through my head made me wobble. Hovering just above my feet at the end of the bed, the strange object glowed and flickered against the walls in my room. It was a warm and gentle light. I gasped. Was it a tiny spaceship?
The object bearing the multicolored radiance steadily hummed as it deliberately glided toward me. Its trajectory was in line with my window sill. Now, it was as if anti-freeze was being poured into the crevices in my brain. Panicking, I inched to my side away from the hovering object, feeling the full effect of the “flight” instinct. In doing so, I fell off my bed and thudded clumsily against the floor. Panting, I sat up on the floor, placed my hands at the edge of the bed, and peeked over my comforter that was bundled upward.
‘What! Is this for real?’ I exclaimed.
The object was foreign and weird. It had a jewel the size of a quarter linked to a necklace. Finally, as if surrendering, it stopped glowing, quickly descended right before my eyes, and landed on the apex of a blanket wrinkle. I leaned in and held out my hand to scoop it up. Suddenly, like the projector at a drive-in, it emitted a luminescent array of cryptic characters through the darkness, against my bedroom wall. The message read—
Theodore, you may be our only hope. Keep this around your neck, because someday it will be the only thing preventing your death and the ruin of the multiverse - K. T.
—or something like that. The glowing message simply vanished before I could commit it to memory. I brought my hands closer to grasp the amulet, supposedly the premonition of my fate. Once in hand, it felt warm, like the side of my TV. When I thought it to be safe, I gingerly lay the strings around my neck. Reluctantly releasing my grip on the amulet for a few seconds, I clicked together the links at the ends of the necklace. As my eyes grew wide with wonder, the necklace itself miraculously retracted to snugly fit my pencil-shaped neck. Cool. Once the necklace was secured, I clasped the amulet itself as if I could never let it go. Didn’t want to risk it, you see. What kid wants to die, or ruin the multiverse?
“As I crawled onto the bed, I wondered what the multiverse might want with a dork like me—and who was K. T.? I figured it to be a dream. I gripped the prismatic jewel firmly, and continued to hum until another day of grounding diminished. I fell asleep.”
I stop recording. I look at the gloomy walls of my prison cell, feeling at one with my just-concluded parable of me falling asleep. I yawn. Enough talking. I will sleep for now in this place in hell, having had the satisfaction of venting my past.
I turn off the tablet and allow it to charge. Lying down on the mats causes my side to sting. I roll over to position myself in a way that is comfortable, with my back against the floor.
Staring down multiple barrels of a chain gun is a situation not too far from the normal reality outside of this fortress. Closing my eyes, I fantasize about my escape from prison for the hundred and fourteenth time.
3 Theodore: The tragedy at taylors falls
True freedom is the product of defeated burdens and an admiration for one’s past. Those days, I must have deserved a brief liberation.
I sit in prison, with a tablet in hand, providing intelligence to the Multiversal Council—which itself deserves nothing from me. I know they proclaim their neutral position, but I still will alter information slightly to avoid implication. I slide my finger across the screen to record, and I start:
“Alright, finally, my grounding at home had ended. Exhilarated, I felt as if I were ready for ‘lift-off.’ It was the end of one of my longest stints in ‘Crane County Jail.’ That morning before school, as I lovingly rubbed my amulet which lay on my chest, I reminded myself that the vision of it flittering about in my room was not a dream—perhaps linked to my fate—but real on all accounts.”
The very next day was several uneventful hours at school. On the bus, heading into the direction of the Red Bricks, I once again admired my amulet. I had daydreamed about it so often in class, that two teachers had snapped at me to pay attention. At the back of the bus sat Jason and Travis, laughing out loud together every thirty seconds during their frenzied, non-stop jabbering. If it weren’t for the new strange object that was now mine, I would have felt a strong pang of jealousy. The bus halted at our regular stop, and we three stepped off.
Still in a trance, I headed to the park to play by myself. I didn’t have confidence that Jason could tear himself away from Travis to be with me.
‘Hey, Theodore! You want to come to our fort?’ someone asked. I turned, curious. It was Jason, with the widest grin on his face. Jason, with Travis eagerly looking on, invited me to his fort, which was nice, but today was different. The astonishing discovery last night still captivated me, and I wanted to be alone with my amulet. I had the fleeting thought that just this once, I should play hard to get. It would serve Jason right.
‘Nah, I have something I need to do. You guys go on without me,’ I said.
‘Come on Jason, let’s go! I have to go ask my dad if I can go,’ Travis said.
Leaving behind my stunned friends, I ran to the park. It was a sweltering day. T
he sky was vast and blue. Gazing at the Red Bricks, which bordered the park, I felt that the dilapidated complex could have devoured me whole or crushed me completely just because of its huge size. Its monolithic presence was slightly creepy, casting a huge shadow over the park.
Shuddering at how even my home could cause trepidation inside myself, I just had to climb a tree to achieve a better vantage point and fiddle with my amulet in private. I was now focused on a particular tree just down from the courtyard in the Red Bricks. Even though it was awfully close to my residence, it had those awesome thick limbs that stuck out sideways and enabled me to climb like a squirrel.
I arrived at the base of the desired tree, and there was no one in sight. There were cars in the lot, a few of which lacked working engines or were up on concrete blocks due to having their rims jacked.
As I ascended the formidable tree, I felt like I was entering a different realm. The theme music to a weird mystery show was blaring from someone’s living room window on the first floor. Safely ensconced on a thick branch, I squeezed my eyes shut, mentally blocking out the music.
As if awakened by the beat, the amulet glowed through my shirt. I was spellbound, staring at it. There were noisy laundry rooms in use on two floors. I briefly jived to the rhythm of the washer’s rotation and the percussion of a pair of shoes in the dryer. Excited, I discovered that the amulet was glowing in tandem with the intricate melody of background sounds! Eager to start climbing the more narrow branches toward the thinning canopy of the tree, I ditched my shoes, and they rolled away on the ground.
“The bark felt rough against my feet. My clumsy forearms scraped from the trunk, adding to a collection of wounds that symbolized my childhood fun. The tree was covered in green lichen.”