Fell of Dark

by Patrick Downes

  My hand might be broken. I punched my bureau. I don’t know why. I have no idea why.

  The power of my heart.

  I don’t always know who speaks for me or out of me. I am many. I have a Protector who shields me against the world, against people, men, women, and other kids, and against monsters, beasts, and the wild. He’s huge and can’t be stopped, but he won’t protect me against the Sawmen. The Sawmen punish me if I don’t listen to the Architect. When the Sawmen come, I suffer. The severing.

  The Guardians command the Sawmen. Geniuses with whips. They will talk with me, but when they talk, they growl. They laugh when there’s nothing funny at all. They laugh at me because I’m stupid compared to them, compared to the Architect. They serve the Architect with total loyalty.

  The Architect lives at the center of me. He created everything within me, and I sometimes think he created me, too. I’ve never seen him, and I can’t imagine him. I know he thinks and draws and stares out of the windows of my eyes.

  Who created the Architect? What was inside me before him? Anything?

  A drop of rain hits the window and dissolves. Another one and another one.

  Thunder, lightning.

  Rain scared me when I was young. Not even so long ago.

  Splash splash splash splash

  I will not be killed. Panic. The lightning, the thunder, the rain. Soaked. Keep running. What have I done to die like this?

  The frog. The frog.

  Sixth grade. Three years ago. My winged mother came out of hell to frighten me. All her screeching and bloody fingers. And my father arrived in fire and pushed my face into my cereal. Nearly drowned me in a bowl of milk. I squirmed out and ran the five flights from our apartment to the ground floor. Escaped.

  My face. Milk running down my face under my shirt, dripping all over my shirt. Milk in my ears. Milk coming out my nose. Milk streaming from my eyes.

  Out in the street, I pulled my baseball cap down low. I had my backpack, my apartment key in my left front pocket, and stuff in my right front pocket. A stone, a bottle cap, a tiny key to a hidden lock, and some change. My sneakers looked new, but the treads had been worn down. I went through a pair of sneakers every month before I stopped growing. All my running and walking.

  My pants above my ankles—high-waters. Always embarrassed and ugly. I still have the ankles of a pony, too skinny for my legs.

  My backpack. Pencils and erasers. Binder. A separate math notebook. A worn copy of Bridge to Terabithia I had to read for class, and a few other tools of the trade. A silver cross on a chain I kept all by itself in a pocket. Lunch in a brown paper bag, a sandwich and cookies that I’d give up or throw out. I had these books: The Pilgrim’s Progress and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Catcher in the Rye, which I thought would have a bad ending and did. Totally boring and meaningless. Very human.

  The school day started like any other. A settling of homework with Mrs. Jacobs. New stuff, whatever it might’ve been. Who cares?

  Then, Kristine Pierre passed me a note. She had to know what would happen. She sprang the trap. The note came through Kristine, who tucked it into my collar since she sat behind me.

  Meet me after school on the back steps. Just you. Mala.

  The rest of the day was a waste. I went around in a fog. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Mala for months. She came here from Bangladesh. I’m not even sure if Mala’s her real name. She might have a Bengali name too hard for me to pronounce. She has black hair almost too thick to believe, a real ponytail. Her eyes are the size of dinner plates and only seem black. I once saw the sun in her eye. Deep brown.

  She smiles like a voice inside of her tells her she’s beautiful and loved. Only a half smile, but happy. Her skin is dark. Dark and light at the same time.

  She made me stupid.

  The day went by until it ended. I stuffed my backpack and sat in the corner of the classroom after the last bell. Waiting, terrified. Calm down. Calm down. I had to get myself together.

  I got to the back stairs and the locked door the janitors use. No Mala, so I waited.

  Five minutes, ten minutes, a year.

  Finally. Mala. Mala, covered in sun.

  I smiled. Stupid, stupid. I smiled.

  Mala. Then, after Mala, after the dream, I woke up.

  What was this? Another girl, another girl, three boys, two more girls, one girl and two boys, until half of the sixth grade, some part of the fifth grade, maybe a fourth grader or two stood in front of me. It’s hard to count when you think you’re going to explode in fear and shame. The laughing started. I couldn’t make out who was standing there laughing.

  The laughing mob, a bright white devil walking on split hooves, came closer. I wanted to escape. I took the steps too fast. I tripped and fell face-first in front of the devil. She picked up her shining goat heel and crushed my left hand. The tip of my left ring finger. The nail would fall off a week later. At that moment, I yelped and snarled. I was a kicked dog. I got to my feet, pushed my way through the crowd.

  The last person was Mala, behind the beast. At the back of the crowd. It made no sense. She looked sad. No sense.

  Her hair almost caught my ankle. I would’ve fallen down again.

  I ran and ran. Opposite from home, so I had farther to walk once I stopped. On one block or another, something caught my eye, a frog in the street. Tears, rage, shame, pain, and still I see a frog trying to make its way across the street. I stood on the sidewalk, watching the frog. I looked up and down the street. No traffic. How long could this last?

  Come on, frog. Jump. Thinking. Thinking. Jump, frog. Get out of the street.

  Why didn’t I walk out into the street and grab the frog, save it, drop it into someone’s front yard?

  Jump, frog.

  The frog jumped and jumped, but it was still in the street. My anger. What are you doing? Jump. You’re almost here.

  Cars drove past in both directions. One missed the frog by a hair.

  Come on. Jump.

  The frog. Stupid, so stupid. What kind of creature lets itself get caught in the middle of the street? I walked into the road and picked up the frog. My stomped finger throbbed, and I started crying. I crunched my teeth. I swore revenge.

  Revenge on who? Mala? The goat?

  I crushed the frog.

  The frog survived the street, the traffic, and I killed it. It died in my hand.

  I’m sorry.

  I threw its body into a hedge and wiped my hand on my jeans. “I’m sorry.” I said it out loud. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Then the rain came.

  Splash splash splash splash

  Lightning.

  I should be killed for killing the frog. I don’t want to die. I run.

  I call for help. Please let me live, dear God. Please let me live.

  Thunder everywhere and the unbelievable rain and the lightning and the breaking frog and my splashing.

  The frog. Thinking about it right now, all kinds of time and other terrible things happening since then. I still get sick about that frog. But would I do it again? I don’t know, which is almost as bad as saying yes.

  A lot of blood. A nail through my foot. A bone, my ulna, snapped in two and breaking the skin. Blood vessels in my eyes. My wrists, my hands, and skull. Lips and knees. My brain, my stomach. Ears.

  Scars. Yes.

  How? Cigarettes, an iron, hammer, nail, fist, fingers. Belt. Cysts. Chicken pox. Stairs. Slippery grass and a rock. Popped bicycle tire. Tine test. Acne.

  Why? I don’t always know. Some of this was my fault. Being foolish. Most of it not. Most of it done to me by my father and mother.

  Did I mention razors? Train tracks?

  Crying against a wall. Disintegrating. Sobbing. In public, a public mall. Corner. Nothing behind. Nothing now. Nothing ahead.

&nb
sp; I always get fevers whenever I’m sick, high fevers, dangerous fevers. The kind that cook the brain like an egg in its shell. Hard to know if these fevers are really my body fighting infection or if they’re the battles between my minds that come so close to the surface.

  This time, I woke up with a tattoo on my right forearm. The letter F. In black, just below the scar where my ulna broke the skin, and the letter was bleeding. Blood smeared down to my hand. Fingerprints. Not just the tips, whole fingers, someone holding my arm. Maybe the person who gave me the tattoo. One of my Guardians? Or my mother? I don’t know. What does F signify? Fire? Frenzy? Fever? Fuel? Fall?

  The letter bleeds, and it won’t stop. Or am I bleeding at all? I can’t tell.

  On the other side of my bedroom wall, there’s another apartment. In that apartment, there’s a man. This man owns guns. If I press my ear to the wall, I can hear him pulling triggers and making the sounds of little explosions with his mouth.

  Pow, pow, pow.

  A trestle where I thought I’d die. I had to do a lot to get there. I had to fight through the Sawmen and the Guardians. The saws.

  I sat on the bridge, looking down at the tracks. The wood, stones, and rails. How long before a freight train comes through?

  Then, as I sat there, prepared and ready, another me showed up. He stood on the bridge, a witness. He didn’t judge me. He didn’t beg me to jump or beg me to think again. He had no emotion at all. He was me, a little older, a little taller.

  Then, another me, a third Thorn, appeared. He stood behind the second me. Definitely wider and taller; he could see over the second Thorn’s head. Not a man, not yet, and he, too, didn’t say a word.

  I stood up and walked over to them. I looked back on the me sitting with his legs over the side of the bridge, waiting to jump. The fall would’ve broken my legs in front of an approaching train. No escape.

  I started thinking.

  You’ve been shortsighted. You haven’t seen anything, done anything.

  I thought and thought.

  You haven’t climbed a mountain. You’ve never gone anywhere on your own. What do you know about anything?

  I watched myself for a little while longer.

  You’ve never been in love.

  I slid off the bridge onto the sidewalk. The other Thorns, already gone, had disappeared into me or the air.

  The Sawmen made me suffer. I felt their blades. I bled from my stomach, my spine split, and they cut me in half again and again. The Architect’s punishment for my thoughts of suicide.

  I survived myself. Doesn’t this mean I’ll survive everything and everyone?

  I was halfway across a street, but the woman in the car didn’t want to stop for the sign. She wanted to slide by. At the last second, she realized she couldn’t make the turn without hitting me. She stopped short. I glared at her and brought my fist down on the hood of her car. “What the hell are you doing?”

  What did she do? She raised her hands and shouted back through her windshield. I could read her lips: “What? I stopped.”

  I argued with myself whether or not to hit her car again.

  Things happen inside of me, and sometimes they come out. I brought my hand down, laid my palm on the hood, and the engine stopped. The tires deflated, all four of them, flat to their rims, and I glued the woman’s hands to the steering wheel. I willed her window down. She couldn’t speak.

  “You’ve got to watch the people,” I said. My voice sounded deep and foreign, even to me: my Protector. “You’ve got to watch the people.”

  Minutes went by before my mind and heart were mine again. Then the sadness came.

  I released the woman’s hands, started the car, inflated the tires, and gave her back her tongue. An angry miracle.

  My name is Hawthorn Blythe. I had a sister named Salome. Her name comes from the Hebrew word for peace. Shalom. She drowned when I was four. Saving my life. All I remember is the taste of the ocean. Salome turned into a seahorse. I’d swear it.

  Her bedroom looks exactly like it did when she was thirteen. A few posters on the wall, certificates of merit in swimming and medals, but, mostly, there’s the sheet music. Sheet music on her walls, books of sheet music piled on her bed, just as she left them, the top one open to Corelli’s Allegro in D Major, no. 11, from Twenty-Four Preludes. She played piano, violin, and guitar. She sang. I have nothing on her. I can’t sing or play a thing. Nothing on her, except for chess. How can chess compare to music? It can’t.

  Salome loved me. This must be obvious. Before she died, my parents loved me, too.

  My parents were named Kermit and Tatiana. Once they fell into their Gehenna, as my father called it, they lost their names. Nameless demons. They visit me from hell. The violence against me started ten years ago.

  Punishment.

  My parents stopped feeding me and themselves more or less. They gave me bologna or peanut butter, water or tea. I have no idea what they ate. I never saw them sit down to dinner. Where did they eat? What kept them alive? Their anger? Their hate? Their violence?

  My nameless parents. I want to give them new names. Kulthat for my father and, for my mother, Tillion. Kulthat and Tillion, the demons who slowly kill me.

  Hawthorn Blythe.

  Hawthorn. My father told me the same information over and over before he became a demon. “Thorn, your namesake comes from a fruit-bearing shrub and tree. Family: Rosaceae. Genus: Crataegus. The plant has much myth and lore around it, from faeries to druids to Christ Himself. I have favorites. Hawthorn kills vampires dead, so to speak. It may heal a broken heart. Christ’s crown of thorns came from a hawthorn, and so it groans and cries out on Good Friday.”

  I have never killed a vampire. I’ve only broken hearts. I believe I could torture Christ.

  Blythe=blithe. According to the dictionary, blithe means “joyous, merry, or gay in disposition; cheerful.” Or “without thought or regard; heedless; carefree.” Do I have to say anything?

  Hawthorn Blythe. Is this any kind of name for an unhappy killer who thinks too much?

  Chess. Kermit taught me when I was very young, before Salome died.

  My father had been a prodigy, though he lost interest. He went to law school at nineteen. Now he does nothing, has nothing.

  Could I be called a prodigy? Hard to say. I’ve never played chess against anyone but my father.

  The day Salome died, my father and I played a game. On the beach, in the sand, a travel set. I took a floating raft out on the ocean. My father had me in check, and I needed to think. Could I save myself from mate?

  I put my head down. When I looked up, ready to come in with my escape, I’d drifted so far out. What could I do? I screamed.

  My sister stood on the beach scanning for me. Her hand shading her eyes. When she heard me, she came to me. A rescue that would leave her dead.

  I don’t exactly play chess anymore. I have no one to play against. I work out the puzzles in the newspaper. I play against myself.

  Is chess a violent game? It’s war on a board. So it’s violent at its source.

  I’ve played more than once against Kulthat, my father who’s not my father. Now a demon. When one of us takes a piece, we make the other bleed. A dagger here, a sword there, an ax, a mace, an arrow. We suffer. We finish games fainting.

  I always win. How could I not? Kulthat forgets he needs to plan. It’s a war, and wars need plans. It needs more than just the desire to damage your opponent, to punish him for breaking your heart. For killing your daughter.

  I feel safe when I take a shower. I don’t know why, but the Sawmen, the Guardians, the Protector, the minds, everybody, they all go quiet. My half memories disappear. I stand in the hot water, and I lean against the wall. The tiles are cool. I stand for a long time, sometimes until the heat runs out of the water. I slump against the wall and almost fall asleep standing up. Occasion
ally, I feel like crying. I wonder if I’ll cry harder than I’ve ever cried. Then nothing comes.

  Sometimes, like this morning, I feel like I’m going to throw up. That passes.

  My fifth-grade teacher hit me.

  I drove him to it.

  “Thorn, for the last time, I know you stole the money. I know it, John knows it, the class knows it. Simple as that.” Mr. Holt loosened his tie. The blue tie with a yellow fish, dreaming of itself with legs. “Thorn, are you listening?”

  I slouched in my chair and picked at a scab of glue in the palm of my hand. I looked at him: “What?”

  “What are you listening to, Thorn, if you’re not listening to me?” Holt crossed his arms. “Why am I talking to you when I could be on my way home? It’s Friday. It’s three fifteen. Why am I here?”

  I sighed.

  This made Holt furious. What was it? My rudeness and carelessness and boredom? That’s what he said. He wanted to slap me. I could tell. I’ve seen the look a thousand times. Kulthat. Kulthat hit me and hit me and hit me. I remember the narrow fire-eyes.

  Holt clenched his teeth and combed his hair with his fingers. Then he smiled. A smile without the smile. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry, Thorn. I got carried away.”

  Silence.

  “Thorn,” Holt said, soft as soft can be. “Where’s John’s money?”

  “I don’t know. Really, Mr. Holt, I don’t know.”

  Holt squatted in front of me. He put down his fists like two stones on my desk. “Thorn?”

  “I didn’t take it,” I said.

  What could Holt do? He had no solid proof either way, so he dismissed me. He asked me to close the door.

  I watched him through the window.

  Mr. Holt sat at his desk with his head in hands. He must’ve wondered what in the end kept him from hitting me. I’m sure of it. I could hear him thinking: He can’t be allowed to get away with it. One good, hard smack—.