Chapter 30 #3
Hours later, he’d broken the lock with a screwdriver, too drunk to remember why he was mad in the first place. He’d sat down on the floor next to me and put his hand on the back of my neck, fingers squeezing hard enough to leave bruises. “You’re not weak,” he’d muttered, “you’re just like me.”
It was supposed to be a comfort, but it felt like a curse.
I slammed the flask down on the table so hard that the lid jumped, spun, and clattered onto the floor, where it rolled under the fridge.
I let it go.
My chest heaved. I pictured Dad, perched on the edge of his seat, fingers trembling, waiting for me to fuck up. To stutter. To breathe wrong.
He would have loved this. Me, a grown-ass man, crying into a flask in the dark.
I howled, a raw, splintering sound, and punched the table. The heel of my hand struck plywood, and it sent a shockwave up my arm. The cinder blocks held, unyielding. I panted, hating myself for being that predictable, that weak.
Like father, like son.
I stumbled to my feet. The chair tipped, crashed, and I left it. I traced the path to the living room, that old landscape of violence and boredom.
I imagined the smell, the summer heat, the nervous sweat that always gathered under my arms. The way my father’s mood would shift in an instant, how he could go from laughing to shouting, from slurring words to glassy-eyed destruction.
I saw myself at thirteen, a knot of bone and scab, sprinting for the door because I’d heard the way his keys hit the counter.
“Get out here, Caiden!”
I always got out of there.
I hate that I inherited his ruins. His anger, his hunger, the black hole at the center of his chest that pulled everything good into it and spat out only bitterness.
I wanted to believe I was better than him, that I would never do what he did. But the anger inside me was the same species, bred from the same blood. It hummed low in my bones, always on the edge of boiling over.
I felt it most with Amelia, the way I needed to hurt her, the way I yearned for her. I pushed her away to see if she could survive it, because that’s what I’d been taught: if you love something, destroy it and see if it’s still there when the dust settles.
This time, I didn’t want to run. I wanted to set the whole goddamn house on fire. Burn the memory out, cauterize the wound.
I slumped onto the filthy carpet, tracing the old groove with my finger, like maybe I could wear it away, erase the dent.
The lights outside were dim enough to make the room seem afloat, untethered, unmoored. I fished in my jacket pocket for another swig but found only the cheap plastic lighter I’d nabbed from the bar earlier.
That’s when it hit me. The idea, hot and bright and inevitable.
It started as a joke. What if I just burned it all down, huh, Dad? What would you haunt then? But then the joke had teeth, and the teeth had a taste for blood.
There were still stacks of old newsprint in the hall closet, yellowed and brittle and probably full of black mold. I pulled out a handful and shredded it into strips.
I built a little nest on the kitchen floor, right under the counter where he kept the bottle caps lined up like soldiers.
I poured the last little bit of booze onto the pile of newspaper.
My hands shook, maybe from the alcohol, maybe from something older.
I flicked the lighter, watched the blue-orange flame dance. The paper curled, blossomed smoke, then caught. The fire made a sound like a deep sigh.
After I lit it, I ran outside, standing in the dark, watching the flames dance.
I watched it eat the memories.
It only took a minute for the kitchen to become a kiln. The cabinets blistered, the fake-wood veneer bubbling and splitting open like wounds. Flames licked up the walls, found the plastic blinds, and chewed through them in seconds.
The smoke was alive, a black serpent writhing along the ceiling, clawing at the drywall, and for a moment I saw my father’s face in it in the flames, gaping and furious, made of nothing but teeth and old nicotine, sneering at me the way he always did.
I didn’t call 911. Let the old bastard’s legacy burn. Let the neighbors wake up to the smell of retribution, to the sound of sirens that came too late. In the middle of the street, I stood and watched my past shrivel and collapse, window by window.
I thought I might feel lighter, but the heat just made the hole in me widen. I wanted to scream, to hurl every curse in the language at the yellow tongues swallowing my childhood, but all that came out was a gurgle.
I slumped against the mailbox, knees buckling, the taste of smoke and whiskey and old shame in my mouth.
The fire tore through the house with a hunger that was almost human. It shattered the windows with a gunshot pop, splintered the porch, and turned everything that ever tried to hold me into carbon and ash. The sound was deafening, a chorus of crackling wood.
“Fuck you, dad,” I slurred, swaying on my feet as I watched the destruction unfold.
The booze caught up to me, and in the heat of the flames, my vision began dancing in and out. I stumbled away from the house, leaving it a shadowed corpse in the dark, not once looking back to see if my father’s ghost was following me still.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my footing and fell. The grass was soft on my cheeks as I let myself collapse into oblivion, the world fading to a quiet buzz, the haunt of nightfall wrapping around me as I lost myself in a dreamless sleep.