A Beginning and an End

A Story by elizabeth

A child watches his mother come home after being abused by a man frequently and finally decides to confront her about not standing up for herself. As he's doing this, the man enters the house.... but I won't spoil the rest.

A boy stood outside of his mother’s bedroom on a Tuesday at about 7 o’clock. She had just gotten home. The room was painted burgundy. It was a circular room with the ceiling, also burgundy, twenty feet from the mahogany floor. A brass chandelier with about fifty candles that looked as if they hadn’t been lit for a hundred years hung about eleven feet from the ground. Standing in the center of the bedroom made a person feel as if they were floating deep in the bottom of a wine glass. It even smelled like a freshly open bottle of wine, usually because there was one or two sitting on the dresser.

The boy had been quietly watching from outside the room just long enough to see his mother pour a glass of whiskey, drink it, and refill her glass, a freshly lit cigarette in her left hand. She had inhaled deeply with closed eyes and blew out swirls of grey smoke with a deep, hollow sigh that let him know that it had happened again. He sadly remembered all of the times he had watched this scene, over and over from the same spot in the hallway or with his eyes closed every night as he listened to her crying out loud. She thought he didn’t know what happened. He had always watched from the shadows, too afraid to intervene. He couldn’t stand it any longer when she rolled up her sleeve to look at a long, crooked, and obviously new cut, something that he’d never seen before. “What the hell happened to you?!”

“Oh nothing darling, I‘m fine!” the boy’s mother said in quite a hurry. Her thick southern accent came out fast but without a quiver. Although she could take the shakiness out of her voice with the skill of a girl who was used to lying, she couldn’t hide the one tear that ran down her face slowly. It brought thick, black mascara with it, making her look even more pitiful. She was five eleven and only ninety-nine pounds by this point, skin and bones. Some of these bones were broken but had never seen a doctor’s eyes, and some of the skin was colored black and blue but had never felt someone’s hands laying a bag of ice on it. This time though, it was the worst the boy had ever seen. Her jaw was black and swollen, and she had blood on her forehead and dripping from the slice in her arm. And she was trying to tell him that she was fine?

“Stop telling me everything is fine, just stop! I know you don’t like to think that I can tell what happens, but I can! Do you hear me? I see the way he shoves you in his car in front of our house! I hear him slam the door when he shoves you back in our house late at night! I hear the silence when he doesn’t bring you back to the house at night! Do you have any respect for yourself at all?” He was choking on his tears by this point. He felt the adrenaline rushing through his body as he finally did what he’d been wishing he could do for so long.

The woman had dropped the glass full of whiskey which shattered at her feet. She was bawling uncontrollably and now sank down to the floor on her knees. Shards of glass dug into her already bruised knees and she screamed in pain. She looked up, threw the cigarette as far as it would go across the floor, and buried her head in her hands. All was quiet then except for the sound of their crying.

“You… don’t know… what… you’re talking… about!” she managed to force out between her violent sobbing. Again they cried together; together, but so separated from each other.

“Then why don’t you tell me what’s going on? Who the hell is that man?!” he screamed. He was enraged. The boy could tell that each word he poured on her was driving itself deep into her. He wanted it to sting.

She suddenly stood up and screamed back at him. “Do you really want to know the truth? That man is, is--” she was silent. Neither of them moved. The only sound that could be heard now was their two hearts beating, and him. The slow, steady pounding of his boots on the wood floor, the jingle of his pocket change, and finally, the sound of a gun being cocked. Her mouth opened wide and the parts of her face that weren’t bruised lost all color. “No! NO!” She barely got it out before he pushed the boy down on the floor, looked the woman in the eyes, and shot her.

He turned to the boy crawling away backwards on the floor. “What she was meanin’ to say was I’m your father, boy,” he sneered. The man laughed. “Your father! That bloody thing over there wanted to get rid of me. Seems she thought I’d been sneakin’ around with some other girls and the like. She thought she could just tell me to leave. I wouldn’t do it though. Nope. Not unless there’s something it for me, I says to her. Not unless I get some money. But that worthless old woman don’t have any money. I got my payment though. I got it all right. Your mother wouldn’t defend herself, not a chance. Seems someone’s been spyin’ on me though, and called the police on me. Those damn coppers came chasin’ after me tonight and so I got rid of that woman and now it looks like I’ll have to be gettin’ rid of you now.”

The boy was cornered now. His father’s breath smelled like whiskey and his voice was rough and mean. The man cocked his gun once more and came a step closer. However, neither of the two had noticed the small fire that had started because of the woman’s cigarette that was thrown across the room. The cigarette had fallen onto a messy stack of papers. The papers slowly caught on fire and eventually, the alcohol-soaked floor was engulfed in a blazing fire. As it spread across the room, the boy and his father became surrounded. The man threw his gun into the flames and laughed for the last time. They stared into each other’s eyes, the boy with hatred and the father with a mocking smile, and watched each other burn to death.