The loud rapping sound from the front door woke Lance from a troubled sleep. He had drifted off in the early hours of the morning at his desk, pouring words out into his thick notebook as fast as they came to his mind. He was writing a story. Until his mother had disappeared he had only written his poems in the notebook. They had been short and simple at times, but nearly always dark and devastating as if they were diseased parts of himself that he removed with a pen instead of a scalpel.
The story that now graced a dozen pages of the notebook was different than anything he had ever written before. It was a fairy tale of sorts. The main character was a boy of his own age who lived in a time forgotten. His family was poor, and his father, having gambled all of their money away, had vanished without repaying his debts, leaving his wife, his infant daughter, and his son to fend for themselves. One day, months after the disappearance of the father, an old peddler came to the cottage selling his wares. The boy had explained to the merchant that they had no money to pay for such things, but he had seemed unperturbed. He told the young boy that if he gave up his right hand for a time, the peddler would give, in return, a bag that contained anything that the boy truly wanted. The boy’s mother had run the merchant away from their cottage, with his objects in tow, and warned him never to return, but the boy was intrigued. He sought the peddler out that night while his family slept. The old man promised he would bring the boy’s hand back after one week, and in return the boy could have anything he desired from the burlap bag that the peddler had offered. Without another thought, the boy agreed and the merchant cut the boy’s hand off at the wrist with an ax. Bloodied and woozy, the boy stumbled home with the bag in his grasp, and as he reached the door to his cottage, he collapsed from loss of blood. His mother found him there shortly after, but it was too late to save him from his injuries and he died only minutes later. When she looked into the bag, she found a rotted hand with only a few strands of flesh clinging to the bones. On the third finger she recognized her husband’s wedding band, and clasped in its palm was a note that read, All debts are repaid.
Lance was fairly proud of the story, and each time he looked at the scrawls of his handwriting, he felt his anger lessen somewhat and the world dulled a little, as though a bulb had burnt out somewhere nearby. At times, when he wrote, he forgot the life around him—his father, his mother’s absence. He cherished the escapes, and the night before had been no exception. He had fallen asleep with his pen still grasped in his hand, a letter L wildly elongated across the page as sleep had pulled him away from writing.
The loud knocking came again, and he heard his father stumble out of his bedroom down the hall with several utterances against the person who would wake someone so early in the day. Lance was still rubbing feeling back into his numb right arm when he heard another voice murmuring at the front of the house. His father’s voice rose and fell as if caught in a high wind. The lower voice remained level, but there was something about the muffled words that piqued Lance’s curiosity. Was it one of his teachers checking in on him? He had now been absent from school for nearly two weeks, his father naming mononucleosis as the culprit that had kept Lance home for so long. The bruises had faded over the last few days, a testament to the healing power of his young body, but his jaw still felt strange. It felt uneven and his front teeth fit differently than before. The pain had faded to a twinge here and there and he was thankful for that much.
As he opened the door to his room, his father’s words suddenly became clear and he could hear the anger mingled within them.