by Jeremy Marr
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His papa had come home one evening and, as usual, sat himself at the head of the table without so much as greeting his family or visibly recognizing either he or his mother’s presence at all. Placed before his father, on the table, were three large plates stacked high with food, and three hefty wooden cups filled almost to the top with water. His papa slid the plate with morning’s meal on it in front of him. Usually he ate his food slowly, whether to savor the meal or remind his family that he was the head of the household, but that night he ate as though he had not eaten in weeks. Whole handfuls of meats, cheeses, rice, and flatbread were shoveled into his mouth as fast as both hands could work the food in, occasionally washing it down with one cup or another of water. When he was finished, there was a piece of flatbread and a quarter cup of water remaining.
He cleared his throat and, without turning around, said in a voice low enough that he could have been talking to himself, "If you had a wrong done to you and you do nothing in return, you are the second one to do wrong to yourself. I am only going to ask this once. Who ate my food?"
The then young Jago had learned from his relatively short past that he did not have a long time to answer before his father would start talking again. If he did not reply before then, trouble would be called swiftly.
“I did, sir,” Jago said, “Only the smallest piece of flatbread from the midday meal plate. I could not help it. I was so very hungry,” he finished while tensing up for the explosion he knew to be coming. He closed his eyes as he saw his father's large hands close around the edge of the thinly topped table. He heard not only chair as is scraped backwards across the floor, but the sharp gasp of air from his mother that followed. The sound of his Papa’s robe as it slid off his chair was next and then mind unsettling silence. If not for hearing his mother as she breathed, he would have thought himself deaf. It was as if time was frozen outside of an imaginary bubble placed around him and his mother.
He felt his mother's arm make its way around his shoulders, which unnerved him even more. She had never been the hands-on kind of mother, and usually never even paid him much mind as she spent her days lying in her bed, mumbling to herself incoherently. Every now and again, a girl’s name could be heard, such as ‘Emma-Fae’, ‘Sabrina-Nikole’, or, ‘Cheryl-Anna’. Jago recalled a rhyme that would always make him stop whatever he was doing then and listen to the mumbled-jumbled garble that slid from his mother’s mouth.
“Sabrina-Nikole,
With the golden hair,
First one ever snatched,
Makes this life not fair
.
Cheryl-Anna,
With the dark brown hair,
Snatched from my hands
As though I was not there.
Emma, Emma-Fae
With the jet black hair,
Snatched from my hands
Without any care.
There was more to it, but he was never able to hear it well enough to make anything fit into something comprehendible. There had been times when he had closed his eyes and pretended she was singing to him. For this reason, his first three born daughters took those names as their own. Those times were as close as she came to being an actual mother. That really did not bother him much though. Because of how he grew up, he had no other mother to compare her behavior to.
The suspense, mixed into the silence, made it impossible for him to keep his eyelids closed anymore than the seconds they had been. Within that time of silence, his father had walked around the chair and was standing in front of him, looking down. As he opened his mouth to try and get one more apology out, his father's left hand catapulted wide right before it shot forward and swung around, back to his left side. He watched it, unable to move as it traveled closer to him. He felt the wind carried forth from the movement as the hand sailed within a hair of his head. His eyes were drawn to the traveling object and he found himself unwilling, or unable, to shift his gaze elsewhere.
For reasons only his father knew, Brendon-Geoffy, Jago’s father, backhanded Jago’s mother. Jago felt her fingernails dig into his skin while she desperately tried to grab anything in an attempt, however feeble due to the haste needed, to find something to keep her on her feet. Jago watched as his mother fell to the wooden floor with the help of his father's powerful blow. He caught more movement from in front of him, out of the corner of his eye. He blinked while turning his head, and in that same heartbeat of darkness felt two vises clamp onto each shoulder. His eyelids tried to open upon completion of the blink, but a sudden upward thrust of his body snapped them shut again. It was a nauseating effect, feeling both the pressure of his head and neck as they tried to burrow into his chest and the way his lower body stretched like a rubber band as he was caught between the war being waged by his father's muscles pulling up, and the force of Christina De’bold’s gravity hug pulling down.
Unfortunately, for Jago, his father won the battle. He felt his body stretch to its limit as his feet lifted off the floor. Still traveling in an upwards direction, Brendon-Geoffy pushed one of his hard muscled arms while pulling the other. Jago felt his father release his grip. The push/pull spun young Jago around, and for a moment or two, he was free-floating upon the residue of the physical force needed to catapult him feet above the floor. Just as Christina was gaining the upper hand as she tried to drag him back down to the floor, he felt the clamp-like pressure of his father’s hands as they fastened themselves around his upper arms in between his shoulders and his elbow.
Brendon-Jago versus Christina DeBold: Round Two sees the latter taking the backseat. If you could have seen Christina’s eyes, they would have reflected hurricane winds of anger still growing within the entire entity. Jago remembered finally being able to open his eyes and almost focus when his father manhandled him around in half a circle. He was now facing the table, being suspended a foot or so above the chair his father had used while eating. When his legs and feet caught up with his torso from the half-circle swing, he felt an explosion in his rear end from the bone jarring impact it had with the chair as his father pushed down. He was sure that DeBold saw her chance to turn the tide of its private war with his father over his young body, and she wasted no time, and spared no effort, in helping to pull the boy back down into her embrace.
He had no choice but to be reacquainted with every bone running up his back as they introduced themselves to each other with a very painful group hug. His chin, having felt possibly left out of the affection his vertebrae paid each other, shot down and gave a low five to his rib cage. Just as he felt the bones in the back of his neck start to recoil up straight, his chair shot forward. Had he any more time to adjust to the sudden movement of both himself and the objects around him, he more than likely would have had the forethought to lift his head. As it was though, he was having a hard enough time just trying to figure out what exactly it was that was happening. Much to his sorrow, a way to stop his forward movement in the chair presented itself to him before he could react, and his open mouth met the tabletop with a very loud “thud”.
His father bent down from behind him and said in a very low voice, “Since you were ‘so very hungry’ Jago, hungry enough to steal from me, I want you to steal from your mother as well.” Jago could smell everything his father ate as his father’s rancid breath scurried over his left ear and found refuge in his nose.
Hearing about his mother, Jago tried to turn his head towards where she had been on the floor seconds ago but was unable to move his neck at all.
“Well,” his father asked, “I thought you were ‘so very hungry’? That is what you said, right? I said to eat!” The last of the words spoken were emphasized by a large meaty fist hitting the table. Through the haze of confusion, he could not understand why his head had moved violently from the vibrations cast-off from the impact.
He tried to say he would eat, that he was sorry, that it would never again happen, anything to make the
torture stop, but he found he could not feel his mouth through the numbness swallowing the lower half of his face. He shut his eyes and screamed a long but silent vow to himself to be a better son. He felt pressure on the top of his head and quickly opened his eyes. The weight he felt overflowed to either side of his head, just above his ears, and down his forehead. He glimpsed three fingertips as they extended just over his eyebrows, and in the scrambled world his brain resided in, thought it was a hand placed there to comfort him. He saw his Papa’s upside down face as it slid over his head to look down at him, and through his tear blurred eyesight it looked to him as though his papa was smiling.
“It’s all over. It’s alright,” Jago's mind told itself. Never before had he been as happy to see his father's face as he was right now, until he blinked that was. Unfortunately, blinking the image altering tears away left world a little less fuzzy to Jago, and he watched, as what he thought was a smile turn into a bloodcurdling snarl. His father's eyes were focused down on the lower portion of his face and he strangely enough seemed to be grunting. Jago tried to look down at where his father's gaze was held but could not see much. Jago felt pressure from the hand laid on his head, as well as the feeling of his skin as it pulled up hard enough to almost tear the flesh around his eyes. He shifted his vision to the left and saw his Papa's other hand gripping the table. He noticed the rippling muscles in the arm testifying to the raw power that, for reasons Jago could not clearly make out, looked as though they were trying to find a weak spot to break through the skin. Jago did not have much time to ponder the newest information presented to his mind before he heard a loud pop, followed by a screech of wood rubbing wood. He saw the table gallop forward and sink down out of sight. The next second found him staring up at the ceiling with his father directly behind him looking down. The look on his father’s face made him appear more animal then human. His world faded to black as he passed out from the pain that came rushing in to fill the void where numbness had previously occupied.
