nolan_void

The sunlight cut through the blinds and into Kurt's brain as he awoke to an unnecessarily bright morning, though it wouldn't be morning for much longer. The night before was mostly a blur. Tina's side of the bed was empty, and he wasn't entirely sure that he hadn't spent most of the night alone. He climbed to his feet and remained on them for a only a few moments before falling back towards the bed. He caught himself on the nightstand, knocking empty bottles to the floor.

Everything hurt since he had woken up. Sometimes he wished that he could just sleep and sleep and never get up, but he had a wife and a daughter to support. Kurt's chest and stomach tightened when he thought about it, his teeth ground together a little. But he knew these feelings would pass, and that the good Lord would forgive him for all the mistakes he'd made. Even though he regretted hitting Erica, she had been disrespectful and she had to understand that it was the Lord's will for her to honor her mother and father. Kurt didn't know any other way to make it clear that her behavior was not going to be tolerated. Besides, there was no such commandment that required him to honor her, which he was not sure he could do even if there was. She had developed quite a reputation for being a drug-addict and a whore ever since she had started high school. He would never forget the shame and embarrassment that he had felt on the night he'd had to retrieve her from a ditch she'd passed out in at a party, with all the neighbors of the area watching and all the kids laughing. That all had reflected on him, but all would be forgiven as long as he kept the Lord in his heart. This is the idea that he had contented himself with ever since he gotten out of jail and convinced Tina to take him back.

He had promised things would be different, that everything was better, but who was he to make such promises? Both of them discovered after a couple of months that not much had changed at all, but now he was more certain than ever that she was too afraid of being alone to ever leave or call the police on him again. As long as he kept her medicated she would never really realize that anything had gone wrong. And Erica was doing a good enough job of medicating herself.

It had gotten dark without him realizing it. He had sat down in front of the television and watched for hours, first a line of sermons, then some football, and before he'd known it, the sun had gone down. The days had gotten shorter as the weather had gotten colder. No one had been home all day. The house was still and silent. He turned the TV off and rubbed his eyes, which watered from being open and irradiated for so long. He could hear the windchime twinkling outside on the porch, and when he looked out the window, all he could was blackness staring back at him. Solitude sometimes leads the mind to tread strange and uncertain paths. He stared hard at the dark, and it dawned on him that he couldn't see anything outside, but anything outside could see him very easily. The urge to close the blinds became overwhelming.

He went to the back door first, and tugged the pully that shifted the blinds in front of the sliding glass doors. Kurt turned and looked at the window beside the front door for a few moments. What was it that he was anticipating? The clock beside him struck 11:30 and he jumped a bit. Then the anger arose. He wished there had been something out there, something that he could hit for making him feel this way. He marched towards the door, his footsteps shaking the shot glasses on his coffee table. There was a knock.

Erica didn't have a key. That was how he made sure that she got home on time. If she didn't come home before Kurt and Tina had gone to bed, then she wasn't going to come home, and if she didn't come home at all then he would bust her ass. It was a simple system with simple consequences. He opened the door, but it was not Erica. A lean young man, with auburn hair that hung low enough to cover his eyes stood before him. He wore an emotionless expression. It was Erica's boyfriend, from school. He, was in every way, not what Kurt wanted for her, but the thing that bothered him the most was that he could not be at ease around this boy. Something always made him feel on guard, and Kurt raged at the idea that this little pissant made him uncomfortable, almost threatened. "Erica's not here," he said to the boy.

"I know she's not here," Devin answered, "She stayed at my house last night."

Kurt felt the color rise to his face. "Well you tell her that she needs to get home right away. Tonight is a school night."

"Can I come in?" Devin asked.

"I'm busy right now," Kurt lied, "And tell Erica that she's in trouble, and she had better get her ass home ASAP."

"Yes, she is in trouble," Devin said so softly that it was almost a whisper, "And that's why I have to talk to you. You're the trouble, my friend. You're the trouble."

Kurt at first thought that this kid was damned right, that he was the biggest damn trouble that this kid would ever see, but the idea that he would presume to tell Kurt anything began to boil his blood. He didn't speak, because if he did, he was not sure he could refrain from hitting the boy.

"I was very happy when you were sent away the first time," Devin said, "I felt that I could be at ease about having one less person arond who was going to hurt Erica. But then you came back. You came back with the same old story that my stepdad gave my mom when he came back. You came back with the same story that every man like you comes back with, just trying to get your foot back in the door of some scared person's heart so that they can't throw you out again no matter how much you hurt them. You call yourself something like 'born again' or 'a changed man' but all that has really changed are the reasons that you do the same thing you always do. Never again will you use another holy or sacred word as an excuse to hurt someone I love."

Kurt backed away from the door, a vein visibly throbbing in his temple. His heart raced, and he told himself it was rage, but the undeniable truth was that he felt like a wolf had come pawing at his door, and like a fool he had opened it. Devin stepped through the door, and closed it gently.

Kurt was forty-two years old then, and he lived for sixty-one more after that. Until he died in terror at the age of 103, every moment of those years, from the time he awoke in the morning until the time he exhausted himself late into the night, Kurt screamed the long and unending scream of a man who had gazed into Hell and never been able to look away.