Lance heard, more than felt, his jaw break as his aching head rocked back on his neck. It reminded him of when he had seen a boy light a firecracker beneath a tin can last Fourth of July. He wanted to fall then, as the pain began to flood the right side of his jaw. He wanted to lie on the stained and pitted linoleum floor and let the night melt away into dreams where his father couldn’t follow him. He wanted to fall, but the bands around his arm wouldn’t let him.
Anthony snapped a short punch at his son’s face and blood began to flow from Lance’s lower lip. Another punch opened a slight cut over his right eye, and after that, Lance lost the will to keep track of the injuries. Before his vision became too red to see through, he noticed the glint of light that kept flashing off his father’s wedding ring and wondered where his mother really was.
Finally, the blows began to taper off, like a heavy rain receding with a passing storm. The hand released its iron-like hold on his upper arm and allowed him to collapse. As he fell gracelessly to the floor, Lance noted that he hadn’t made a sound throughout the assault, and somewhere amidst the swelling sea of agony, he believed his mother would be proud. The pain was all-encompassing, a writhing mask that crawled across his ruined face and crept down into his neck. Blood pooled in a dark corona around his small head, and when he tried to open his mouth, his jaw moved barely an inch, then stopped.
Without thinking, Lance began to try to stand in an attempt to make it to his room, where he could at least lie on his bed. He had barely gathered his hands beneath him when a hard-soled boot skipped off of his temple, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, Lance dropped into the unfathomable depths of unconsciousness.
Chapter 2
“There is always room for coincidence.”
—Alva Noto
The next week was a surreal passing of time that Lance faded in and out of. At times he would awake to the pitch blackness of his room in the middle of the night, his desk and chair strange shapes beside him that seemed to move and undulate in the darkness. At other times he would open his blood-encrusted eyes to a blindingly white day that made him turn to the shelter of the wall and wonder if the world was made entirely of razor-shafted light. His dreams became reality, as one trailed into another like a looping reel of movies played constantly on the backdrop of his mind. Creatures reached out to touch and prod him as he crossed burnt landscapes of piled corpses. Hands grasped at his pant legs as he stepped on the rotting dead, and he knew he shouldn’t look down, couldn’t look down. And at last, when he could resist no more, he gazed at the body gripping tightly to the cuff of his jeans, and his mother’s bloated face stared up at him with pleading in her filmy eyes. He had come hurtling out of the dream as if flung by the hand of God himself, and nearly ruptured a vocal cord as the hoarse scream tore out of his throat with talons of glass. No one had come to see if he was all right, not that he truly expected a visitor. In reflection, he was glad that no one had checked on him, considering his father was the only human being close enough to hear him cry out.
Sometimes there were bits of food and glasses of water on the chair near his bed, most times not. Time ceased to have meaning as the days passed for him in his pain-induced coma, and it was only when his father finally shook him awake one afternoon that Lance realized how long he had actually spent in his room, alone with his wounds and deep dreams.
“You’ve been shittin’ the bed for a week, get yer ass up and get on the pot from now on if you have to go.” Anthony stood staring down at him from his bedside, his thin arms planted on narrow hips.