12 Kilos
The Worst One
“Get up!”
The voice still sounds full of groggy sleep, the intention though is clear. Either get up or get kicked until you get vertical.
Garrett stands up and feels the bitter cold rushing in as he stands up from the blankets that have been shielding him from the cold. It has to be somewhere around five am, maybe coming up on six. Garrett doesn’t need long to remember the events that are about to be presented. A hunting trip, the first after the drunken incident in the barn.
As if to assure Garrett of his presumption, he runs one hand across the back of the other in the dream and flinches, the stitches are still fresh enough that they stick out from the surrounding feverish flesh.
They work in the barn, wordlessly, they do some quick weeding in the garden that sat beside the house, the one that Garrett and his aunt planted and kept thriving, also wordlessly. Garrett is hungry but there will be no food, he is cold but there will be no warmth to be had that day, only cold briny water, and with luck some meat to eat before exhaustion overtakes him at the end of an impossibly long day.
The next words Garrett hears after his wake-up call is his father’s endlessly angry and disappointed voice once more, “Get up.”
The earth was softer than it looked, Garrett tried to step around the edge of the mud and sunk down to his knee, he tried to pull himself free and only managed to fall into the muck that a pile of fallen leaves had been doing a nice job of covering up.
“I’m trying.”
Garrett got one hand, his off hand, wrapped around a sapling branch and he was trying to use his wounded hand to pull his lodged leg out of the thick soupy mud.
“Always an excuse with you, isn’t it.”
Garrett wants to say something in return, an honest rebuttal. He would have an easier time without the wound, the one his father gave him while drunk. There are parts of Garrett, in the dream to be certain but also at the time in reality as well, parts that want to hate the awful man. Garrett never managed to build up a sense of hatred for his father, as a child, pity was as close as he ever got on that front.
Garrett manages to pull his leg most of the way out of the muck and still has a grasp on the sapling when he feels a sudden sharp pain. He yelps and let’s go of the sapling and feels his leg sink right back into the soupy mud. His father stands closer now, a thin sapling branch in his hand. There’s a white line already turning red running across the back of Garrett’s off hand, add a dozen stitches and it could be a near match for the wound still making life hell for him on the back of his good one.
“You ain’t gonna have a branch to save you in life. Figure it out!”
The next obvious choice would be asking for help but Garrett knows that will result in another white, hot line of agony being laid across whatever part of him is nearest his father and the sapling branch.
This is a nightmare, just another ugly memory left to fester and grow teeth at night.
Garrett tries to think out loud, to interrupt or cancel the awful dream, and when that doesn’t happen, he howls at the old man:
“I was a child. I was ten years old! You were my help, all I ever had except for my mother’s sister and a village full of assholes who hated my guts!”
Garrett catches five more of those angry red lines across his back and legs before he manages to pull himself out of the muck using nothing but his wounded hands. The mud was insidious and what’s worse it wasn’t all mud. He got worms from that trip, and the wound on his hand pulled open and got infected.
That night, shivering and holding onto his swollen, anguished hand Garrett sat well outside the warmth of his father’s fire. There was no catch, no meat, too late in the season, and his father was already drunk and worthless before nightfall. He could hear the old man chewing on a strip of jerky. That was the night, even after the incident in the barn, after he had been beaten time and time again under the guise of discipline. After being told time and time again that he was the reason his mother wasn’t around anymore, that he was the reason the village hated the both of them. That was the night that Garrett first realized his father truly hated him. No, he despised Garrett.
As a ten-year-old child Garrett didn’t have the courage or the vocabulary to properly poise the questions he wanted to ask that night.
What could I have ever done to you? I didn’t ask to be born. I never hurt you, or anyone.
No. At ten all Garrett did was think about running away but that didn’t make sense, where would he go? What about his aunt? She was liked even less in the village than he and his father were.
That night ended with Garrett crying as silently as he could manage until the tears ran dry and he began to hear his father snore by the fire.
The nightmare ended with Garrett, young again, wounded, nearly defenseless, and sure he was being watched by something, or someone out in the trees. The figure again? What on earth did the figure want? What could it want? It stalked him from nightmare to nightmare, haunting his dreams like some awful apparition.
Garrett woke, understanding that it was still early, too early to be walking around the crowded trails of the bunker made do with skimming his hands across a few closer piles of relics and junk until he found a brittle old paperback book.
The reading would be slow, painful too under the singular red light bulb, but anything sounded better than trying to sleep again.