He heard a soft whimper and the sharp intake of breath through clenched teeth, then another flat thud of skin meeting skin. There was a pause, and then he heard the thumping of his mother’s slight frame crumpling to the kitchen floor. Lance closed his eyes and wished again that his father would die.
It wasn’t the normal whimsy of a nine-year-old boy, it was a yearning driven by an engine of cold hatred. Deep in the recesses of his mind, Lance knew that wishes were foolish. When he wished for something like he did now, he felt like he did in church when his mother took him. He would stare at the sculpture of Christ on the cross, one hand nailed solidly by a nine-inch nail and the other torn free, reaching out to his own father for salvation. Lance would look at the upturned face in the grips of the most horrid pain, and when the priest would tell the people in the pews to bow their heads and pray, he would feel foolish. He would ask God to save him. Save him and his mother from his father. He could hear the words echoing in his mind like shouts in an empty cavern. If God was listening, he wasn’t answering. Lance often mused that God wasn’t helping him because the almighty could see what was truly in his heart. He didn’t just want his mother and himself safe from his father’s unending, incorrigible wrath, he wanted his father to die. With hatred like that in your heart, he supposed, how could your prayers be answered? At the age of nine, he had already found his first paradox, without knowing the true meaning of the word.
Lance sat up from his small single bed and listened, his dark hair beginning to encroach over the boundary of his smooth forehead. His eyebrows formed a V shape in the middle of his face, and his wide hazel eyes shifted uneasily. He couldn’t hear anything. Absolutely no sound wasn’t good. Not that he wanted to hear bruise after bruise being laid upon his mother, but the silence was worse. If he couldn’t hear what was happening, his imagination had to fill in the blankness of the moment, and his thoughts were usually much worse than reality.
He heard a chair scrape across the rough tile floor at the end of the hall. That would be his father sitting down. Sitting down to look at what he’d done, not in remorse or shame, but almost in reverie. He liked to examine the welts and blackness that formed on the skin; his dark eyes would run over the injuries and catalog them one by one.
Lance’s mother, in turn, would also remain as quiet as possible. For such a petite woman she had a certain steel inside her when it came to pain. Perhaps it was the tempering of fifteen years of marriage to the man who now sat over her, studying her misery. Although, from time to time Lance would hear her cry out, and it seemed that when this happened, she would receive double what was average within their household. It was as if Lance’s father was waiting to see weakness, a chink in her armor that she held so tight around her.
A soft sob met Lance’s small ears, and he let out a breath of air that he hadn’t realized he had been holding. A sharp crack announced the opening of one of the cold Michelobs from the fridge. This was another morbid wonder that often left Lance perplexed. His father only hit his mother and him while he was stone sober. Once the alcohol broached his system, he became quiet and withdrawn, and at times seemingly unaware of even their presence in the small house they shared. They became specters to him, and the times when he was thoroughly drunk were some of the happiest Lance could remember.