The Becoming

The sun was threatening to rise and make all of this real. The boy sat solemnly on the edge of his bed. He watched the ascent through the opened window. He was tired but did not want to sleep. He didn’t think he ever could again. The images lurked behind his vision, waiting to materialize and explode before him like endless fireworks. An orange mountain sat above the the rooftops of the adjacent homes. He thought of existing in such silence as he did now and believed death would be a better choice than to remain on this plateau of nothingness. Everything reminded him of Grandma, and even if it didn’t he’d find a way.

The recollection of his father was to conjure up the image of an animal he’d never seen. It occupied a small, hollow place inside the boy like a missing tooth. His mother held a firmer grasp on his consciousness but even that was nearly gone. When he thought of her nothing but a murky figure appeared. Was she tall or short? Long blonde hair or short and brown? Pale or fair skinned? If his father was a lost tooth, his mother was a dying flame.

His grandma was different. She had a lament or a phrase or a story for everything. It was as if she had been alive for two hundred years and committed it all to memory right down to the moment she was pulled from her mother’s womb. The boy could picture her sitting in the floral reading chair, dust motes a grainy film across her wrinkled skin, speaking in a contemptuous tone about her delivery doctor: “He pulled me out of there by my scrawny neck, nearly killed me. Then he spanked me on my bare bottom, the pervert. I suppose he gets his jollies spanking little girls like that. Don’t you know he divorced his Mexican wife and ran off with one of his nurses.” The boy laughed. Crazy as she was, she’d raised him so she was a part of everything he knew. And to see her laying there, to see the uselessness of the human body, to let the veneer of character fall and reveal the bloody, stinking things we actually were was too much to accept.

Light gleamed in his eyes, it was raw and warm. The pistol rest on one of his bent legs. A bluejay alighted on the telephone wire that halved the view from his window. He picked up the pistol. Already the feel of it was very familiar though he had just learned of this new sensation less than a day ago. If he had the power to end Grandma’s life then he had the power to end his.

He’d never seen the sun come up before. Had never thought to. It was something that was expected from the world: the sun rose and when it fell it dragged the moon behind.

How was he to do it? Should he put the barrel to his forehead or should he clamp down on it with his teeth like they did in the movies? Should he ‘eat’ the gun? Would it hurt? Grandma had gone limp immediately, but that didn’t mean she died just as fast. She could still be alive. No, that was impossible. It must be instantaneous, had to be. And if it wasn’t what do could he about it anyway? “You can apologize for an action but you can never take it back.” That was something Grandma had told him early on in the days where he sat across from her in the parlor, afraid to make one wrong move, one wrong sound. He had been more scared of her back then than he’d been of the numerous strange, stern faces he’d met when moving house to house.

The bluejay disappeared with a loud staccato flap of it’s wings. The neighborhood looked as still as it had when this all started. But it was missing something. There was a ringing in his ears that was no longer present. In school, he’d learned that humans possessed an electrical current and maybe that was what people heard when they knew someone was near without seeing them. Without Grandma, he heard nothing.

He’d eat the gun.

The metal tasted foul. His tongue was slick with oil when he rounded the barrel the way one does with new braces. He wasn’t exactly sure of how to hold it or where to point it. He breathed in and took one last look at the few houses allowed by the small window. He saw Anne Dodson’s house, with it’s sheeted windows and scattered patio furniture. He thought of the way she looked at him before she had passed by to answer that thing pretending to be Mr. Dodson.

“She’ll do things to you. Things you don’t want to do.”

The boy knew what kind of things she meant now. And they were bad.