Andy

I have been told by several readers that "The Olive Tree" (the small portion of the long fiction piece I've been working on lately) is "unsettling" and "creepy" and--according to one real sickie-- "sexy." All stated they would like to see more from the larger work. That's fine with me, as long as no one is expecting a ton of context.

Here's "Andy."

*****

Andy

My father was a cruel and terrible man. He was with my mother for less than a year, and she was a fool to stay with him that long. When she told him she was pregnant, he beat her face with his fists, and he kicked her legs from under her. She curled into a ball, pulled her knees to her chest and locked her hands in front of her shins. He chipped her vertebrae with the steel toe of his boot, and left bruises on her buttocks and thighs in the shape of its sole. He spit on her and called her names. He tried to get at her stomach—at me—but all of her strength was in her hands. He broke her fingers, but she did not let go. He crouched down and pulled her hair, and he thumped her head on the kitchen floor. Her left eye filled with blood; she struggled with migraines for the rest of her life. When he was finished he left, and was gone.

He left her.

I was born early, underweight and sickly. I was thirty-four minutes old the first time I died of heart failure. The doctors tried to brace my mother for the inevitable, but she refused to believe them, to see what was right in front of her. She was twenty-six years old, but she looked forty.

For five weeks I lived in a tangle of wires and tubes, warmed in an incubator like a chick. My mother stood in the NICU hallway for hours at a time, watching me in my plastic box through thick observation glass, waiting for me to die, or to get on with living already.

She was right there the second time the crash cart was summoned. In all the commotion, no one thought to remove her from the scene. She watched my pathetically undersized chest seize, and listened to the muffled, steady whine of the heart monitor through the glass for three minutes and thirty-six seconds.

The doctor leading the crash team finally pronounced me dead, but—to his chagrin—I came back before they had a chance to turn off the monitors. I managed to continue living without significant interruption for the next eight and a half years.

* * *

We lived in small apartments for one or two years at a stretch. My mother worked long hours at low-paying jobs. She left me with a rotating series of friends as often as she could, until—one by one—their guilt was eclipsed by their exasperation, and they told her I’m sorry, but I just can’t… By the time my mother ran out of friends, I was old enough to begin school, so that was a kind of solution.

I wasn’t particularly smart. I wasn’t charismatic. My mother dressed me in well-worn clothes washed and re-washed into colorlessness. I disappeared into the backs of my classrooms, and amongst the crowds on the playground. People talk about the word, but this kind of living was nothing so dynamic as unhappiness. I learned by watching my mother that living was simply about surviving life.

There were men after my father. My mother would leave them after they hit her the first time. She couldn’t understand why—eventually—they would always hit her. She told me she wouldn’t let anyone hurt me. She told me that she could see my father inside of me. I never saw a picture; never met him. I looked for the shadowy reflection of him on my mother’s pupils. She always looked away.

There was an after-school program. When I was seven I got into a fight with another boy. He called me a faggot and punched me in the ear. Neither of us quite understood what the word meant. He was small, but his fist was practiced and bony. It landed with a crunch, and my ear grew a little crooked after that. My mother let my hair grow long and combed it over the bent ear to compensate. This was an example of how to survive.

* * *

My mother fell asleep most nights on our lumpy couch, the television clearly audible through the wall separating our living room from my bedroom. I slept with a flickering, cartoon-shaped nightlight plugged into a wall socket.

The first night they came to my room, I thought they were angels. My nightlight began to glow improbably bright, its output far exceeding its wattage. I blinked awake just before the tiny bulb exploded. Pop. Enough street light cut through the blinds that I could still make out the three of them standing around my bed.

They told me to be quiet, and to stay calm. Even that first time, I wasn’t very afraid of them. They told me there were rules; we were going to do things that I couldn’t tell anyone about. They said the things we were going to do were very important. I believed them, and I followed all of their rules for as long as I could.

They came every night (although they told me it wasn’t really that often). They told me what was going to happen to me, and so I wasn’t afraid when I started to get sick. I was old enough to demand privacy from my mother. She had no reason to see my bruises, or the ruby streaks shot through my morning shit.

I didn’t tell anyone, but one morning at school I was sicker than I thought I was. I collapsed in front of the coat closet. My classmates began to scream when they saw the blood. My teacher called for help on her cell phone and cradled my head on her lap, trying to keep me from choking, expecting me to die there, bleeding out onto her dress—bleeding out from she wasn’t even sure where. But it wasn’t until I was in the back of the ambulance that my heart stopped for the third—and last—time in my life. I flatlined just as the EMTs were pulling up to the emergency department. The doctor on call managed to bring me back after just under five minutes. It was a personal record for us both.

My vitals stabilized quickly after, but I remained unconscious for hours. The nurses removed what pieces of my blood-caked clothing hadn’t already been cut away in the ambulance, and began washing my body. That’s when they found the bruises.

I didn’t tell anyone. I followed the rules. But I was asleep, and I couldn’t help what they found.

Comments

[sara]

Damn, dude, I thought I was dark.

[Kiel M.]

Yeah, man. Uplifting.