Individually Wrapped Horrors

by Eric Joel Kleinschmidt, Sr.

  The next day, the old man got an offer from a neighbor a mile or two up the road to help him take down a few dead trees and cut them up for firewood and he’d pay him a hundred bucks, cash. We didn’t see Dad until ten o’clock that night. The neighbor really got his money’s worth out of dear old dad. Really kicked the fight right out of him, too. Either that, or Mom and her rolling pin did. Mom, on the other hand, was a busy little bee all day. When we got up to get ready for school, she was already hard at work scrubbing the floors, headset on highest volume, working at a near-fever pitch. She barely gave a mumble as we headed out the door to the waiting school bus. When we arrived back at home afterward, she had rearranged the furniture in almost every room. To put it another way, every room that had furniture to rearrange, had been so rearranged. She was sweaty and panting but going strong nevertheless. She still had that headset on and we figured she must be done with the new book and must have restarted it. We headed upstairs to do our homework. That house sparkled and shone like never before. The old man staggered in late, making a ruckus that woke us both, and we heard a glass break in the kitchen. His footsteps on the stairs and more of that loud, drunken mumbling he was so well known for. He banged open the bedroom door and Mom whisper-scolded:

  “Get into bed, Jim, for Christ’s sake. You’ll wake the kids and the whole damn neighborhood.” The creak of the bedsprings as Dad fell back onto the mattress.

  “Jus’ wan’ me sleepin’ so’s you can kill me, you old witch,” he slurred. Mom said something muffled, but with vaguely reassuring tones. A slightly louder bedspring squeak and then Mom going downstairs to clean up the mess. I now believe the folks who say things like M.O.M. stands for ‘Moments of Madness’ or ‘Masters of Multitasking’, or even ‘Managers of Messes’. That last one in particular, I think that most moms can attest to. Men are the bringers of damage and war and hurt and death. Women are the healers and nurses and maids and mothers. Men try their hardest to burn the world to the ground, women are always there, without much fanfare, to clean up their messes and bandage up their wounds. Doesn’t make me feel very good about being male, to be quite honest.

  The old man, though, he just gave men a bad name. Or made the rest of us look better, however, you want to view the matter. He was just a bastard. I can’t say it any other way than that. Mom did make it all the way through that—that—that book. I know that for sure because she had been listening to it for nearly two weeks and a ten-disk audiobook just doesn’t take two weeks, especially at the rate she was running through those disks. Her eyes began to develop red rims around them, she lost weight; after the first week, she quit bathing. Her smile was like permanently fixed on her face. Like the off switch was broken and sooner or later, the lights would just have to burn out on their own to go off. Molly and I whispered about it at night sometimes when we were supposed to be sleeping. One or the other of us would creep into the others’ bedroom and we would whisper our fears to each other. The old man would just stay gone from sun-up to sundown. Mom was very tense and would snap if you approached her to ask a question. Any time she had to pull the head phones away from her ears, she was moody and dark and soon—hateful. The smile now looked more like a grimace and her skin began to look like a thin sheet pulled over a skeleton. I got to school one day and looked in my lunch bag and Mom had packed me a bottle of nail polish, a bottle of mustard and a tube of toothpaste. She never went out anymore, not even outside. By the end of the third week, her friends were completely done with her. Lynn’s mom Rose even told Lynn—who might have mentioned something to Molly—that she was pretty sure Betty was joining Jim down on Lush Lane. That was the new theory in town, Mom couldn’t beat the old man, so she joined him. From an insider’s perspective, I must say we had our concerns on the matter as well. If Mom and Dad were both boozing and being complete idiots, who was going to take care of us and the house and, well, everything? The house…Molly and I kicked it up a notch and really began pitching in more, hoping Mom might come back around and not wanting her to come around into a disaster area. But she never did. The final day—just twenty-two days after receiving the new audiobook she was so clearly obsessed with—our mother, whom we loved and respected and adored and counted on, succumbed to fifty-three self-inflicted knife wounds. Some were…um…small. Superficial cuts and scrapes. Others were a bit worse. Cuts deep enough to bleed heavily. Life-threatening in themselves. Others were…*retches*…um, well, deep and severe in nature. The final wound, where the police and paramedics found the still-embedded knife, was deep into her own throat. The living room was painted. Arterial spray like a mad painter really throwing it around, you know? Exhausting his reds…She had gotten herself so deep with the final blow that the point of the knife—from her own kitchen set—was tenting-out the skin on the back of her neck. It never broke through, but you could see it. The old man was gone for the day as usual and us kids were the ones to discover the…um…mom, we were the ones to discover mom. She was in her favorite blue dress. The one she only wore for going out special. Like she knew what was coming. Like it wasn’t some weird madness that grabbed her and wouldn’t let go. Like it was planned far in advance. There was a burning pot of spaghetti on the stove, smoking up the kitchen. We had to open windows to air the place out before getting the ambulance and police in the house. I think the worst part of the whole sad affair was that no one could find the old man for hours. We wouldn’t have cared if he never came home, but we knew eventually he would. He’d have to. We had to sit with a child services officer until he staggered in wasted to the gills at almost 10:30 p.m. He underwent the fastest sobering I have ever in my life time seen and then proceeded to receive the sternest reprimanding I have ever heard in my life. The officer left and we sat in the shadows of the living room by moonlight, cried out and exhausted, completely drained and derailed. The old man sat in his easy chair with his head laid back. He didn’t speak. He was just there. An inanimate lump. After an infinite amount of time—or so it seemed—he slowly leaned forward, chair creaking in protest, and let his horrible gaze fall upon us. He looked down at the floor, then back up at us. He spoke.

  “I don’t know how this could’ve happened to us, kids. I don’t…” His voice broke and a traitor tear escaped and rolled down his dark, scruffy cheek. “I can’t…” He tried again, but his voice caught and he hitched in a sobbing breath. “She was the best part of us. Of all of us. And I wasn’t very good to her.” His face turned away from us. We stole a glance at each other unbelieving, then looked back. “I’m gonna try…to do better by you kids. For Betty. For your mom.” He looked back down at the floor, then once at us, then he got up and walked slowly and silently off to bed. But he was never any better. He was mean to us and everyone he came into contact with until the day he died. Some people just have that mean streak in ’em, that blackened heart from some unremembered thing from their own childhood. Some destroyed potential. Some wasted youth. Tainted innocence. Whatever the case was in his life, the death of our mother enhanced that. It boosted the signals getting through to his pickled brain—and the signal was “self-destruct sequence activated.” The signal was “hate.” The signal was strong and coming in loud and clear to his warped and bent mind. The signal was “booze.” So, he drank. He drank to excesses I couldn’t even imagine. I saw the empty and often times broken bottles begin to pile up around the house and yard. Kids at school were talking and pointing and whispering:

  Hey, there goes the kid whose Mom went crazy and stabbed herself to death and whose dad is a raging alcoholic and oh, by the way, how long till he and his sister snap and follow dear old Mom into the great beyond? Or will daddy dearest go first and leave the two of them for the state to look after?

  Yes, I heard the whispers. We both did. I think, more than anything, that was what drove Molly to pick up that first bottle and follow in dad’s footsteps. It was not long after that that she became very well acquainted with the mints and the lying and then finally just the open and upfront acceptance
. The acceptance that people knew and Dad knew, too, but more importantly, that I knew. We would talk about it briefly, at first, then she became hostile and very powder-keg touchy about the subject. She would go off on me about it not being any of my business and why do I feel so high and mighty and perfect? and more importantly to stay out of her business, stay out of her life!! I withdrew my petition to care. Sort of. Not really, but I couldn’t show it. So, I just grew hostile toward her. She and Dad grew ever more and more alike, though they never grew closer together. More like they were two seasoned vets on opposing sides of the same battlefield. Both thinking what the hell! and damn the torpedoes! Sometimes, I felt like a P.O.W. being traded from side to side (neither side really wanting to get me back) and just wanting it to end so I could go home, only I was home. And there was nowhere else to go. I hope that doesn’t sound as melodramatic as it does in my head, it’s only the truth after all.

  I had to watch my sister all but morph into the old man and I just couldn’t take it anymore. She held the guilt for mom, see? She told me on numerous occasions, she wasn’t going to let me have any of it, it was all hers. I tried to reason with her and tell her that was just crazy, it wasn’t our fault if Mom went crazy. If anything, it was the old man’s fault and he alone could carry that particular cross. She never really agreed, just went back to her golem shadows and her wailing at the moon. She began to eerily channel the ghost of our mother. Nothing supernatural, you understand, just in appearance and voice. It was like Mom was back from the beyond. Molly developed those red rims around her eyes. Over time, she became gaunt, almost emaciated. Her friends, all but Lynn that was, took a hike and she became a bit of a loner. By this time, she was working at a run-down factory on the other side of town. Sounds like an old Bruce Springsteen song, doesn’t it? Yeah, she was in with a crowd now that mostly had no driver’s licenses for d.w.i.’s. She was forever giving folks a ride home from where they all worked. Mostly all smokers and drug addicts or ex-drug addicts. Alcoholics ’r us! No random drug testing where she worked. No sir. Ten bucks per hour and you could have all the freedom of the drink and the pill and the smoke that you wanted. Just ten bucks per hour. She drove an old bucket of a Honda hatchback, red and rust colored. Big cracks in the windshield. Her teeth began rotting away until most were as black and jagged and used up as the old man’s had been a few years back. She still lived at home and spoke to almost no one unless she had to. On occasion she spoke to me about the old days and that she really missed our mom and then this glaze of apathy would settle back over her blue eyes and she was gone again. Bedroom door slamming, those old records—which she had confiscated the year before from me—playing at full volume through the walls. The old man would come staggering in at a quarter to whenever and thump his fist on the wall and the volume would decrease slightly, but he never engaged her about it face to face. That would be crossing over the front line into enemy territory, sir! I had no friends left at this point to mention either. It was very ironic, three loner, social outcasts living together and yet nothing to say to one another. A gloom settled over the house as the heart of it had died a while ago. Mom of course was the heart of ours. When she did…what she did…she murdered a part of a living, breathing, sentient thing that is every household with love inside of its walls. It bleeds like any other feeling organism if you cut it and if you cut deep enough, it bleeds to death and the colors and daylight run out of every crack and every corner. Shadows creep in and replace it like phantom thieves, opening the doors wide to ghosts and melancholy and sorrow. Rage and depression feel like they are left uninvited to the party of the century, so they, too, come and crash at your new place, sneaking in the side door, of course. Your Palace Depression, as I once saw in a movie when I was a kid, so long ago when times were better; not great, just better. Mom was the heart of our home. When she died, it killed what was good in there. Molly was the grim reaper, bringing in every type of sorrow and sadness she could muster. And through this whole period of time, my thoughts kept narrowing down to one thought that floated in as gently as a feather on a whispered wind in the sweetest part of late spring… When we found mom, I remember thinking it so odd and sadly terrible that she should have done what she did—while wearing and still listening to her newest audiobook. I could hear it faintly coming from the headphones. That thought that kept coming back to me time and time again was what happened to them? The headphones, the audiobooks, the cd player ~ what happened to them? What happened to them? What…? Questions, questions, but never any answers. Through the devastation that took place with Molly’s body, mind and life, I would forget the thought and let it fade from concern over her deteriorating state. Then, lying in bed at night, listening to her smoker’s cough grow worse and worse, or hearing her in the bathroom throwing up whatever she drank for supper, the thought would drift gently back in, landing on me with all the grace of an eighty-thousand-pound Mack truck. It was around this time in my life, still in the last months of high school, that I began to develop my ulcers. Yup, just an all-around great life we had together…and it was about to get even worse.

  When the E.M.T.’s pulled her body out of the car—twisted, mangled metal wrapped around a nice big elm tree—all puzzle pieces finally clicked into place for me. I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid and just never saw the truth that was staring at me right in the eyes. They pulled the…um…pieces of her out of the car, out of the windshield, off of the tree and out of the ditch. She had been going better than ninety miles per hour, unbelted, when she and the tree met for the first and last time. They *sniff, sniff* found her head about twenty or so yards away from the accident scene. They had come unplugged, but the headphones were on her ears, almost like they were glued there. Then, the most ominous and awful discovery was made, looking back on it now, that is. The headphones had come unplugged from the portable cd player. The cd player was still in the car, busted and smashed up on and in the dashboard. The cd itself, part of the ten-disk new book Mom had received, was completely unhurt, undamaged, laying silver side up on the passenger side seat. Just neat as you please. Debris from the accident lay all around it, but not a single thing touched that God-awful disk. It stared reflectively and mockingly up at the first responders. It was given to me later on in a small evidence bag. I had asked if it was in fact evidence of something? I had been told no, they just thought I might want it since it was hers and wanted to protect it for me. I cringed inside, but took the disk. The cd player and headphones were gone, but that whole entire horrendous book survived. I knew it meant something, had severe and horrid implications, but had no idea what they were. Was this audiobook behind the fall and collapse of two once-amazing, once-beautiful, once-alive and oh so amazing women? Or was I just an over-stressed, severely over-depressed grieving family member who was jumping at shadows? I didn’t know. Just then, I didn’t care. Everything I had ever loved in this miserable excuse for a life had been taken away from me by some god of sadistic intent, clacking away at some celestial keyboard, and I just didn’t care anymore. The thought crossed my mind that according to old wives’ tales, the family members who were good and loving were always the first to go, the bad apples stayed around long after, still spoiling the bunch. I found out this was all too true, at least in my case. The disks, all ten in mint condition and packaged neatly back in the sleeves in their case, was the only worthwhile thing of salvage from the wreck. Everything else in that car was destroyed or worthless. Molly was buried three days later, after the autopsy and toxicology reports came back in stating that her alcohol content level was three times over the legal amount. No drugs were found in her system, but I really didn’t expect there would be. The old man saw to the details of the funeral with numb apathy. There was no wake. No one to show up. Lynn had moved to Colorado at this point to start at a university out there and really, who else was there to show up? She and Molly had not really been that close at the end anyway. The old man had said something cryptic under his breath at the funeral like, “G
uess I’ll be putting you in the ground next at this rate.” I ignored him and went back to my grieving.

  Time went by, as it has a way of doing, and graduation came. It was a stupid and grey thing that hung lifeless in the air before me. I went to the ceremony alone. The old man was passed out drunk on the couch in his yellowing undershorts. I got a pretty decent job with a local window manufacturer. Pretty decent pay, good hours. Plenty of surprise drug screenings! That was a definite plus. I started seeing a girl named Bobbi. It was nothing serious, but it had potential. I’d come home from work and—still living at home with the old man—try to not be there as often as possible if he was. The old house seemed to me like it was collecting ghosts. I could still see every trace of blood in my mind from where Mom had finished up. Molly hadn’t died here, but I’d swear I could feel her or sense her kind of hanging about. The old man would come in from whatever he spent his days on and scrounge around in the kitchen for whatever he could find to eat. He grew very fond of bologna during that time. I still didn’t have much of an appetite, but that was OK for keeping any unwanted pounds off, I thought. Plus, it wasn’t like I wasted away to nothing like Mom and sis in their last days.

  One night, Dad was out snoring on the couch—I think he got to feeling like the bedroom was haunted, because he spent most of his sleeping hours on the couch with the TV on and muted—and I was upstairs in my room. By this time, I had a pc on my bedroom desk and when I wasn’t out with Bobbi, I’d get online and chat her up or just do some gaming. I wasn’t big on the whole social media thing. No one I really wanted to talk to except Bobbi. Still too many negative things being flung around town about my family. I was kind of bored that night and trying to think of what to do to take my mind off of this travesty called life, when I happened to glance over at a pile of old school books on the dresser. The corner of the audiobook stuck out from the bottom of the pile. I got up and walked over carefully, cautiously, like a man approaching a basket of snakes who were surely going to spring out like in a movie and strike with venomous force. I slid the books aside and stood looking down at it, not wanting to touch it. I wouldn’t touch that poisoned thing. I refused to touch this thing that may or may not have helped in the deaths of Mom and Molly. So thinking, I noticed it was already in my hands and I was leafing through the disk slots. Crafty bugger, I thought. I flipped through all of the ten disks, then doubled back to the first disk. I watched from a million miles away as a set of fingers that looked suspiciously like mine withdrew the first disk and put the case down on my computer desk. Coming back to myself, I thought, OK, what are you trying so hard to tell me? It would seem that its hellish work was not yet done. I popped open the DVD tray in the computer tower and put the disk on it. Closing it, I thought a small prayer and put on my gaming headphones. The prompt menu came up and I clicked “Play Disc.” I waited for an eternity in the seconds before the man spoke.