Sick & Tragic Bastard Son

by Rowan Massey

  My heart sped up when Dad’s house came into view because there was a car in the drive. It was Zander’s piece of shit. I couldn’t believe I’d ever gotten in that car with him. I was such a god damn moron. I’d liked that boy—that piece of dog shit! Was he somehow healthy and just hanging out in Dad’s house? If he was, I’d stab him to death. No, I knew they probably took Dad’s car and left Zander’s. It still made me anxious.

  Parking in the street, I went up to the junker and peered in the windows. There was trash everywhere but nothing interesting. I didn’t know what I was looking for, I just knew I wanted to find something, anything, that could be used for justice. My fists were itching for a weapon the wield against him.

  My chest was shaking with each breath, afraid Zander would come out of the house. I tried all the car doors and they were locked. I had to break in. To find a rock, I went into the neighbor’s yard where decorative ones lined the shrubs.

  I’d done crazy things many times before, but I’d never smashed a window. Gearing myself up for it, I ran at the car and threw the rock with a scream that tore at my raw throat.

  The smash made me jump backward. My heart pounded in my already aching chest. If someone heard it and came to check it out, I wouldn’t have much time. I reached in to unlock the door and open it. The glass would cut me if I got in, so I opened the glove compartment. I was hoping for an illegal gun, some drugs, anything. There was only trash and some papers. I glanced over the registration. It wasn’t his. Lysander Aaron Mason might be his father or something. But then, maybe Zander was short for Lysander. Who knew?

  Avoiding the glass, I managed to unlock the back door and fish around under the seats from there. I popped the trunk and took a look but it was empty. I wanted to look in the house and knew I couldn’t waste time.

  The key didn’t want to go in the lock. I was trying to open the front door with the wrong one. I was completely frazzled.

  Going in and not seeing Remmy or hearing Dad call out a hello was weird. It was like walking around in a surreal nightmare land. Sneaking around Dad’s bedroom was going to be the hardest part, so I searched around the kitchen first, finding nothing, of course.

  I ended up in my bedroom, sitting on my bed and wondering what would happen to our home. When Dad had finally renovated the house so that I could move in, he’d done his best to help me decorate my room, but he broke the expensive mirror that I had so carefully picked out and fallen in love with. It had swirly green designs all around the edges. He’d apologized and went right back to the store for a second one, not once complaining about the cost. He knew I’d planned a whole decorating scheme based on that mirror.

  So when he brought home the wrong shade for my walls, I hadn’t said anything. I’d painted every wall in my room a shade of green that clashed with my bedspread, rug, and curtains. When my friends came over, they said nothing, but looked at it a little funny. I’d told them it was intentional, that I’d seen it in a magazine.

  On my bookshelf were the young adult novels he had brought home for me after every book expo event he attended. I wasn’t interested in the fantasy ones, but to be polite, I’d said I’d liked one of them. He’d bought me the series after that, so I’d read an entire series that I didn’t enjoy. I took one of those books from the shelf and laughed, but tears interrupted my small moment of humor. I put it back and left my room.

  The living room was next. I walked aimlessly past the TV and around the sofa.

  There was a familiar sweatshirt hanging on the coat rack by the front door. I tore it off, sending the rack crashing, and threw it on the floor to stomp on it, screaming, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck YOU!” until I got my shit together enough to pick it up to check the pockets.

  Like I was a tiger pacing a cage, I went around the parameter of the room, grazing my hand over the books, which I knew I would cherish forever. I would never let anybody touch Dad’s house or his things.

  The picture over the mantle caught my attention again and I stared at it. Why would he have a picture of himself or one of my cousins? We weren’t close to that side of the family, and Dad didn’t have any pictures up of himself, only of Mom and me.

  I got a weird feeling; the same feeling that had told me Zander had set the fire, and that something had happened to Dad. I picked it up and opened the back. There it was, written on the back of the photo.

  Lysander.

  Frozen at first, I stared at it and wondered what it could mean. I left the front door open, hurrying to Zander’s car. I got the registration and read all the information on it. There was an address. It wasn’t too far.

  I was going. I was definitely going.

  ◆◆◆

  The house I found was tiny and run down, front lawn completely overgrown. All the blinds were closed so I couldn’t peek in. I’d have to knock on the door to find something out. If there was nobody home, I was calling the police to tell them everything I knew.

  It took a few minutes to get up the nerve to approach, but I remembered the pepper spray on my key chain and slid the little red latch to the side to have it ready.

  At the door, I took a few deep breaths and pushed the doorbell button. There was no chime. I hit it again and nothing happened so I had to knock. When I did, the door moved slightly. It was open. I could only see dark shadows inside.

  “Hello?” I called.

  No answer.

  I stood there shuffling my feet, wanting to barge in and just see what I might find. I shouted a few more times and waited several minutes before I told myself, fuck it. I went in. All the lights were out but I could see enough. Battered and dated furniture in the living room, a mess of ash trays, dirty dishes, and clutter everywhere. There were a few school pictures of the same boy that had been on Dad’s mantle. With undamaged photos of him at different ages, it was obvious that they were all of the same boy, and that Lysander was Zander. I took a photo of him in middle school from one of the frames. I would take it home.

  Walking through the dining room, I found more pictures on the dirty floor among the crumbs. There was a picture of me in a bathing suit when I was younger. Seeing it there was eerie. It made me feel violated. My eyes darted around the dark house as if checking for skulking slimeballs.

  The other pictures had Dad in them, some from when he was much younger, and one current. I would take all of them.

  The kitchen was downright scary and the stench was shocking. Before I left the room, I spotted something on the fridge, attached with a red, flower-shaped magnet. It was a scrap of paper with a note on it in tiny, tight letters.

  There’s a certain amount of cruelty in the world and we can’t stop all of it.

  That was something Dad once said to me. I remembered because I’d thought it was appalling and he’d had to apologize to me. We’d talked after that, and he’d told me it was something his grandpa had said to him, and he’d never liked it either.

  Dad or someone must have said it to Zander too. Finding so many things linking my dad to the person who lived in the disgusting little house made me nauseated.

  I took it off the fridge and stuffed it in my pocket. The house was so quiet that I noticed the fridge wasn’t on, neither were any lights or clock displays around the kitchen. The power was shut off.

  Hoping to find something incriminating, I headed for the narrow, dark hallway to the bedrooms.

  I jumped and an electric panic went up my spine. She was standing so still I didn’t see her at first, even after having taken a step down to the first door on my left. I somehow managed not to scream. Taking a step back, I made myself breath and keep my cool.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother anyone. The door was open…”

  She took a slow step towards me, leaning on the wall. I had to squint to make out her features. She was a black lady so skinny that the skin hung off her skeleton in folds. She had scabs on her face and arms. Some of them were infected. Her baggy clothes suggested that she hadn’t always been so
thin. As she slowly came closer, she didn’t look at me. I held a hand over my mouth when I saw the mucus running out of her nose and down her lips and chin.

  “I’m looking for Zander,” I tried, but I was ready to bolt. “Lysander?”

  She turned her face to the wall and started a shambling crab walk down the hall towards me, her nose and all its snot wiped onto the wall. She was breathing loudly from her chapped lips, each inhale like a soft grunt. There were more streaks. Both hallway walls were covered in dried snot.

  I ran. My feet found their way to the exit on instinct, slamming the door wide open, escaping a house of madness. The ceiling was caving in just behind me. I was sure of it. I felt a demented shriek building somewhere behind my eyes—in my brain—but no sound escaped me.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Zander Age 18

  WHEN I WOKE up from my coma, I started to remember looking over at Clay where he’d fallen to the ground. I’d only been two feet away from him. I was watching at the moment he died. His eyes were swollen shut, skin red, soot up his nose and on his face. We hadn’t been able to find Remmy. We’d tried to leave the woods but we were too turned around.

  Something had stirred over his face. Unlike the angry, darkened lights over our heads, the light on his face was iridescent, moving in a soothingly slow tempo. It rose out of Clay and hovered there for a moment. It was like a bioluminescent jelly fish, long and thin tendrils trailing behind it. I knew what it was. It had to be his essence giving up and moving on. It went away into the smoke at its own slow and contented pace.

  Clay was just a body now.

  I was in the hospital for endless days after being woken up from the coma. I was being treated for my fucked up lungs and sinuses, but mostly it was about the burns. I hadn’t let myself look at them yet. I knew all I needed to know from the pain. When nurses and doctors visited me, I turned my head away, and they didn’t comment. It would have been pointless to do so because I wouldn’t speak to them.

  One day, a smiling nurse came in and said my sister was there to visit with me. I told her no. She pretended not to understand and motioned for someone just outside the door to come in. I threw a water bottle at her, then a tray of uneaten breakfast, and I yanked the heart monitor—with all its wires—off my chest and threw that too, the adrenaline masking some of the pain of movement. By the time I stopped, she had already hurried out of the room and shut the door.

  It was my second week in the hospital, a little less drugged up, that it all came at me with a sharp rush of lucidity. I saw myself as I truly was, as if I had merged with a tiny, sane part of myself at last—a self that had been right next to me observing my life in its entirety, recording things with a precise intelligence that I myself hadn’t been capable of. It had been waiting for its moment to unite.

  All memories were now made of reality and logic. I understood at last that I was a shifty monster, incestuous, devious, vile, and utterly lacking of sanity. I’d killed the only person who had ever seen so many parts of the real me and still somehow loved me and chose to live with me skin to skin. After all the planning, which I’d found such pride in, ruin and pain were the only things I’d successfully executed. It was a worst case scenario I never could have imagined.

  My mouth gaped open, my neck arched, and I choked air in through my dry and soured throat, then let my anguish out into the world on a scream.

  Thank you so much for reading Zander and Clay’s story. I hope you were equally disturbed and titillated. For more about the author, please visit RowanMassey.com. Or sign up for the newsletter and be the first to find out about new releases and more.

  More by Rowan Massey:

  Such a Colorful Feeling

  Book One: Ozzy

  Ozzy could ruin Jace’s life to buy his own freedom…or let himself fall in love and save Jace’s life instead.

  Two dozen new types of recreational drugs were invented in the eighties. Now there’s no one left who isn’t a user. As a result, civilization is falling to its knees. The skies are polluted, having a job puts you in the minority, and public services like health care and police protection are for the rich.

  In a town called Emporium, Ozzy works as a rent boy in a seedy club. When Jace, an overdosing teenager, is dropped at his feet, Ozzy sees an opportunity. His cruel pimp and mayor will let him cross the guarded borders of town and escape to a better life if Ozzy finds his own replacement. Jace, although he’s disabled, seems like a candidate.

  But things won’t be that simple. Jace is sick and won’t last long. Under increasing pressure to save himself from his pimp, Ozzy races to save the life of the guy he’s not supposed to be falling for.

  Warnings: This is a gritty, tragic series that doesn’t hold back. Although the first book fits the romance genre, and will allow an HFN ending for its characters, the rest of the Such a Colorful Feeling books won’t necessarily fit the romance category, and they definitely wont have happy endings.

  Upcoming!

  Such a Colorful Feeling

  Book Two: Wally

  Book Three: Doc

  Book Four: Jace