Father
Originally published in Shallow Waters Volume 6 (Crystal Lake Publishing, September, 2020).
922 words
The man I have been living with does not know that he is my father. If he did, I would be dead.
"Zeus!" he bellows, the gruff sound of his voice further muddled through the floor. "Beer!"
His speech is slurred, though it is only six in the evening. I make my way down crooked steps, passing sugar-thin windows that rattle in their latticed frames. Gritty snow lashes the weathered walls of our sagging Colonial, sounding like sand poured over a washboard. We lost power two days ago. I cup my hand around a small candle, protecting the dim light against a bitter draft that threatens to snatch it away.
It's brighter in the living room. Warmer, too—here I cannot see my breath. Against the far wall a fireplace roars, servants always on hand to feed it logs from the supply in the garage.
"More of the same, sir?" I ask, glancing at the growing pile of empty beer cans beside his recliner.
He grunts. I nod, turning toward the kitchen.
"Wait. Forget the damn beer. Whiskey this time."
"Of course, sir." It's difficult not to smirk; this is what I've been waiting for. He did not know me when we first met, instead taking me in as a favor to someone. It took a while before he trusted me to serve his drink, but that was always the plan: to gain his trust. And like most alcoholics, my father is predictable in at least one regard: his drinking habits. Beer in the morning and early afternoon, whiskey in the evening.
The house is dilapidated, but otherwise kept tidy by the servants that scurry from one room to the next. By the sink is the liquor cabinet, though checking it I find it empty. Ordinarily one of the kitchen servants keeps it stocked, a short fellow with red hair, but no one has seen him in two days, not since he made my father angry.
Descending into the cellar where the bulk of the stores are kept, I make my way past a forest of meat: rows upon rows of salted and smoked slabs suspended from hooks bolted into the ceiling. Pork, beef, goat. Other things not meant to be eaten. My father likes meat a great deal. Soon that will change.
Beyond the meat are shelves on the cellar's far wall stocked with jars, tins, boxes, sacks, and bags of different goods. I haul a case of Macallan under an arm, careful of my sputtering candle, and ascend the creaking stairs back into the kitchen.
I take one of the glasses from the cupboard and pour three fingers, then, glancing about the kitchen, sneak a plastic baggie of powder from my pocket. A swirl of the glass is all it takes for the powder to dissolve.
"God damn, what took so long? You distill a fresh batch yourself?" he says, glaring at me as I hand him the glass.
"I'm sorry, sir. I had to go into the basement. The liquor cabinet hadn't been stocked."
He twists in his chair to yell toward the kitchen but stops, seemingly remembering something, then takes the glass of whiskey and begins to drink.
I turn to leave but then stop, hearing a loud grumble and burp emanating from his tremendous girth that fills the sagging, threadbare chair.
"Ugh, Jesus," he moans, rubbing his stomach. Already a sweat has broken out across his brow. The powder is working faster than I thought it would.
He leans over the armrest and vomits, a stringy trail of yellow spittle dangling from his mouth. Eyes bulge in their sockets. From his mouth a stone falls to the ground amid the heap of empty beer cans. I bend down to pick up the stone, holding it beside my face.
"See the resemblance?" I ask, smirking.
"Who..." he gasps, veins protruding from his neck. "Who are you?"
"Six children you had. Six you ate—or thought so, anyway." I shake the stone in his face, gloating. “I don’t think it looks much like an infant, personally. More like a potato. What do you think?”
He swipes for me but I dodge him, taking a step out of his reach. I watch as he coughs and spills green and yellow bile onto the arm of the recliner. He leans further out and the chair tips over, dumping his mass onto the wooden floor with a reverberating crash. Plaster sifts from the ceiling. The servants have converged from throughout the house, silently bearing witness. They do not intervene.
The sound of his retching drowns out the storm outside. Blood splatters from his mouth against the floor as the contents of his stomach are forced out. Misshapen and half-digested lumps of chewed meat begin to emit. His body trembles with each heave of his gut. A crushed eye, the sclera still visible. Teeth. Fingers. Lumps of hair, bones, knobs of cartilage from broken joints. From the heaving creature before me are born the digested remains of my brothers and sisters, five in all, and had I not been secreted away by our mother, I would have been among them.
He crawls away from their remains, as if disgusted by their sight, dry heaving and choking on his own vomit. I kneel and take the mass of flesh into my hands, cupping them and scooping what I can to hold against my breast. We have work to do, my siblings and I, so much work. But first I must make them whole again.