Pizza Time

I remembered the last time with terrible clarity, but this time seemed different... for once in a long while, I felt... alive. I took a deep breath, and the seconds flowed by with syrupy sluggishness, as everything, including myself, waited for my reply. A manic giggle burbled deep in the vast recesses of my soul, and I heard a mad, crazy voice whisper tantalizingly, "Why not?" I held the breath for a heartbeat, savoring the taste of the air for one seemingly unendingly long moment, and then my mouth moved. My lips shaped themselves to make the first syllable of my reply with exquisite perfection, and my breath flowed out as smooth as silk. My throat vibrated as it made sound, and my mouth moved to shape the sound into words in an elegantly delicate ballet of muscles.

Father's palm cracked on the counter as he shouted, goaded beyond reason, his usually slightly tanned skin mottling dangerously. "NO?!?! GOD DAMN YOU SEAN! YOU WILL OBEY OR I WILL TEACH YOU, GOD HELP ME!"

I stood, and barely noticed the brittle silence that had descended, following his shouted statement. With a single breath, I had severed the ties that bound me to the shore, and I had irrevocably cast myself into an inconceivably deep, glass-smooth sea. Do or die; sink, or swim.

Darren came forward, and laid a restraining palm on my shoulder as Ekataren walked up to the counter, glancing coolly between Stan, Darren, and myself.

"Sir, I must protest your use of language in this public environment. Please belay your tongue." Darren said politely, trying to defuse the situation.

Father turned on Darren with a feral gleam in his eye. "Oh, you too? Are you in league with this devil-spawned boy?" His face was almost cherry red.

"I'd watch who I called boy, father." I said quietly, my voice sounding so very quiet to my ears. Darren squeezed my shoulder warningly. Father's face went from red to white.

"Uhh, I'd like to pick up an order?" Ekataren said uncertainly.

Father turned and faced her, his face quickly mottling in fury, before he screamed, "Shut up, you whore! A MAN is talking now!"

I could see Ekataren's expression flit from shock, passing consternation, and finally, to rage in the frozen, brittle moment in time we shared. I fought to keep the years of anger bottled for just a little longer. I fought hard, but it was for naught as the bottle exploded in a single explosive scream of rage at the uncaring heavens. I saw, through sanguine-clouded vision, father turn his head in surprise. As he looked over his shoulder, his expression changed from rage, to a smarmy, smug superior smile...and then the smile fell like an avalanche into fear as I took a step forward. Then the frozen brittle moment in time shattered, sundered into more pieces than there were grains of sand on a million worlds in a thousand galaxies. And then, everything happened at once.

Something clamped down tightly over my shoulder, but I slapped it aside and jumped the counter, my feet hitting the floor at the same time with a muffled thud. With a sudden feral hunger, I smiled at him, somewhat friendly, I thought. I could see was his fear fade slightly, replaced by a thin, brittle smile, as he tried to assert his dominance.

"Sean, stop now, or I'll have to hurt you." He said commandingly.

I just kept smiling, and I took another step forward. Something grabbed me from behind, and hands wrapped themselves around my chest and arms. They were strong, stronger than I usually, but my blood burned with a vile fire that lent me strength enough to twist steel like taffy.

Father recoiled back a step, and I tried to take one, but I seemed to be dragging several hundred pounds of deadweight in my wake. Smiling wider, I took a powerful step forward. He was just barely within reach... I heard shouting. I took another step forward. Within reach, but not close enough to do enough damage... not close enough to rip his throat out with my teeth... I took another step. Father stood rooted to the floor watching my slow approach, his expression strange and frightening. My hand reached out, and a rock hard fist crashed into my kidneys as a thick arm wrapped around my neck, cutting off my air. My kidneys tingled, as I held my breath. I took another step forward, and then blows started raining on me like a hard hail. Grunting, I strained against whatever was holding my arms back, my lips pull back from my teeth in a hideous, ghastly rictus grin. Something hit the back of my head with a sickening crack, and my legs went rubbery, my hands clutched ineffectually at his shirt as I fell to the floor, the world blurring around me.

* * * * *

It was a crazy dream, a fever dream. My father came to see me, and in his arrogance, he thought he could make me come and heel at his feet like a neglected mongrel. What was worse, I almost did. I almost wanted the illusion of the perfect family so much; I almost did heel, in the hopes that this time, it would be different. But he brought back memories of what family meant to me. He didn't want a family, I realized, he wanted a pack of beaten mongrels that would follow his commands, and something smaller than him, and something that wouldn't fight back, to vent his anger upon if there ever was any problem. I savored that thought for a long time. Finally, I had the key to a large door that I had been carefully not to see. That damned door that was always at the corner of my vision, all the while the great chains that bound it tightly shut rattled sharply in the silence of my soul. Try as I could to not see it and hear it, but I could not help but feel its presence as I stood in its shadow for the longest time.

With a sigh, I unlocked the door with a sharp turn of the key, and a grunt of effort as I pushed the door open, and then looked upon the face for one dreadful moment in the since and darkness after the door opened of my greatest fear. The fear that I would become my father. I had been so afraid of it, I had made it flesh and blood, and I had given it enough power to transform a vaporous thing into a near physical thing that impeded my past with a familiar sick smile and an arrogant tilt of head. His eyes softly smoldered a sanguine hue, with a white-hot pupil that seemed to stab through my fragile skin, and seemed to see myself without the layers upon layers of psychological debris that seemed so important when I placed them. He was barely perceptible in the darkness, a figure of too black against a velvety black background.

"So, you finally admitted something to yourself." He said as he stepped though and blocked my path with a supercilious pose. A light flickered in the hand he cupped in front of his face, and for a moment, I saw myself in all my hideous glory, a reflection of myself seen through the vilest of mirrors. It was a sight I never wanted to see again. "Expecting a parade, boy?"

He flicked his hand, extinguishing the flame, as the smoldering end of a thick cigar glowed white hot and the smoke from the cigar floated upwards in slender lucent sapphire silk ribbons and stung my nostrils with an sweet acrid stench, like the smell of burning flesh and rubber. I remember that smell; when I was five, there was a car accident not far from my house where a woman's husband had burned to death in the wreck as she watched, horrified, and unable to do anything to stop it.

"No."

The woman killed herself three days later, out of her mind with grief. She was the aunt of one of my friends at school.

He took another pull from the cigar, and then said derisively as thin ribbons of smoke shot from his mouth with every syllable, "So, you can admit things to yourself. Halleluiah and Hail Mary, boy." He tapped the slim finger of ash from the end of his cigar; it fell to the floor and screamed as he ground it out underneath his booted heel.

The scream was familiar. I pushed a boy in fourth grade off a metal merry go round. He landed wrong and broke his arm. He screamed so loudly, so harshly, as tears flowed down his face in thin rivulets, I thought he was going to die. The beating afterwards from my father, I screamed just like the boy, I cried like the boy, and I knew I was going to die that day, but didn't.

"I was wondering when you get around to noticing that our father is a dick," he continued, "but sight is a disadvantage on the path ahead. It will cloud your vision, and fog your thoughts. You will regret what you see, and what you didn't."

"You want to stop me?"

He took another pull from the cigar before replying carefully, "Not stop you. To warn you. Turn back, and life your life blissfully unaware of the horror that lies ahead. Remain ignorant, and you will remain content, perhaps even happy to the end of your days."

"You lie badly." I spat at him.

He shrugged, "Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your point of view. I have nothing to gain from lying to you. I warn you here and now that the path ahead is for the foolish and the mad for I have seen it for myself, and I desire to spare you the pain you will certainly endure."

" 'for the foolish or the mad?' I am both."

"Bullshit. Now who's lying to whom?"

"Trickery and treachery; that is your method."

"No, whatever works in the long term, that is my method. It might also help you to know that many of your friends suffer from your decision as well."

"How do you know these things?"

"Simple. I am you, and you are me. We are together, and inseparable. Wherever you go, I go. I see what you do not want to. We are together, forever."

"No."

"Yes. Listen here, I could try to seduce you with visions of wealth, and fame, and power, but you don't really want those, making the point of tempting you with them rather moot." He took another pull on his cigar, "But I can promise you this: if you give up and go back home, and give your father another chance, he might change for the better. You can all become a family again, like you never were. Everything you want out of the deal, you might be able to get, if you turn away now."

"Will other people get hurt if I stay?"

He shrugged. "Can't say."

"Can't or won't?"
"Look, I'm you -- and you are certainly not all-seeing."

"And if I continue?"

"Pain, suffering, death. The path ahead is paved with razor blades and broken glass, and everyone you care about will walk it with you at one time or another. There is enough sorrow to drown a world, enough horror to strike fear in the strongest man's heart, and enough suffering to break any man."

"And my family?"

"No longer."

"And myself?"

I saw him smile. The first time I saw him smile, and the last time I wanted to see it ever again. His skin pulled back from his teeth; revealing several uncountable rows of barely glowing, inhumanly needle sharp teeth. "Can't say. Too many outcomes. Some of them good, some of them bad. But all of them are... deliciously delightful."

I hesitated. The compulsion to remain was strong. If I remained, the situation would not change, but at least it would be something familiar to deal with, and I would continue to survive just as I was until I was no more. But was I just content to just survive? I mean, it was a living. No. It wasn't a living, it was merely survival. What if I wanted to live? What if I wanted to break out of the never-ending loop I had put myself in to just survive? Could I remain and still do that? If I stepped though, I would walk my own path forward, picking it out as I went along, and with no one to help. Alone again. Still.

It occurs to me occasionally, that perhaps extending the olive branch of peace might be a good idea occasionally. Get on good terms with my parents; mend the gaps, picket the fences -- or whatever the saying is. But just as I think of it, my memories swallow me briefly, replaying what happened before I voluntarily left. A cavalcade of familiar horrors proceeds past me as I struggle back to the surface, towards the present. At times, I argue with myself that perhaps they love me. Perhaps they are regretful for what happened. Perhaps I can forgive, and we can start anew... Perhaps. However, after a few tries to declare peace, or even a basic truce, have failed utterly and miserably, I no longer actively try. But that still doesn't stop the voice in my head, egging me on to try again. Betting against the impossible, that this time -- this time! -- will be the time. The time when all is forgiven, and forgotten, and we embrace each other as a loving family, where fear and suspicion aren't felt at all times when together, where I don't have to worry if I'll be beaten enough to require a hospital stay this time, like so many other times...

I yearn for a family on one hand. But I fear and loathe the family I have on the other. I curse the mother that bore me, and I damn the man that fathered me. Yet, some small part of me years for the time when I'll be able to embrace my father and my mother as a loved son, and gone will be the bitter hate, fueled by the bottomless, measurelessloathing I have for them, like so much smoke. My mother, my father. They brought me into this world, and raised me, and I abhor them with every fiber of my being.

When I was younger. And believed in the Easter Bunny, Saint Nick, and a host of other enchanted fables, I would so desperately wish, nopray, for a normal family. A loving family. Or, failing that, a solution...a magic wand...something...anything. Time passed, and I suffered more and more, until I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I could not fix my problem. No deity or myth had helped me, no matter how hard I prayed, or how much anguish coursed though my body, or how many times my bones were broken. So I left. I left before whatever madness that had taken hold of my parents could take me, and make me like them; before it could twist me into an angry caricature of a human that fed off the pain of others. I sometimes wonder if I was too late, and the madness already inside of me, lying dormant in a quiet part of my mind; perhaps waiting just outside my awareness, silent, sinister, and seething horribly, like a brutal tempest just only just seen on the horizon. Now I knew he was that which what I feared. And that scared me more than I had ever been scared before. I had found the enemy, and he is myself. Can I fight him? Can I keep fighting him, me? Is it worth it? Should I even try?

Then a wild giggle in my ear whispered fiercely, "Why not?"

Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I will fail. Maybe I'm not ready for it.

"You never know until you try." I heard another voice say.

A whole chorus of voices in a multitude of tones urged me onward. All of them said, "Why not?"

I stepped forward, and he smiled with a familiar sick smile and arrogantly flicked the last of his cigar into the darkness where it was swallowed, leaving no trace of it behind. "I thought you would. I'm you, after all. I look forward to our next meeting. And in advance: I told you so." He finished, and then walked away, swiftly swallowed by the darkness as if he was never there in the first place.

Only time would tell if he stayed behind me instead of perched ahead of me like some sort of vile gatekeeper. Perhaps this was the last time I would see him, but I doubted it.

If I have taken the first step into the unknown, why does it feel like I'm in free-fall? I feel... alive?

Alive... it was a new feeling, a good feeling.

Indeed.

Chapter Four

- Reactions -

My eyes fluttered as I leisurely floated towards awareness. Like broaching the surface of a pristine lake, reality slowly settled upon my shoulders and pooled behind my eyes. As the heavy mantle pressing down reassuringly, I groaned softly; my eyes seemed to track independently of each other as sizzling lines of tepid agony pulsed with metronome precision, churning out a painful tempo that threaten to upend my stomach in one lurching rush.

Biting back the sickly-sour taste of bile, I tried to sit up slowly, but shuddered to a stop at the beginning of the attempt when thin skeins of pins and needles engulfed my arms and legs. I felt like a clay doll, just come to life, and everything felt strange. A cool hand gently caressed my forehead for a moment before Ekataren's upside-down face looked down on me; her hair fell forward, elegantly framing her face with a beautiful, sinuous waterfall, like watery silk.

"I would disincline you toward moving around too much, you have quite a lump growing on the back of your skull." Ekataren said gently. Startled, I reached back and felt my head gently. My eyes widened my fingers traced a lump about the size of Idaho. "I wouldn't squeeze it." She warned me as the corner of her lips quirked slightly.

Rebelliously, I squeezed lightly, more like a caress, really. It wasn't the brightest thing I've ever done. My vision exploded into fireworks as my stomach vibrated hideously for a very long moment. Ekataren's smile turned positively wicked as I fought valiantly to keep my lunch from exploding all over her very pretty face. Feeling queasy, I hiccupped quietly, tasting foulness. "Ooh. I don't feel too good." I moaned. Acid burned the back of my throat as my stomach finally consented to settle down, at least for the moment.

"That is to be expected. You should be proud; you have a skull made entirely of cement. My hand still stings." She said, shaking her right hand comically, her voice bubbling as the corners of her mouth quirked.

I wondered idly how soft those lips were, they looked inviting from here... I saw myself kissing them, luxuriating in their softness. My hormones surged dangerously as my face heated, part hormones, part embarrassed. Our eyes met as I dragged my gaze higher to something safer, but while her lips were suggestive, her eyes were deep oceans I could easily, and very willingly lose myself forever in.Damn hormones, "What happened?"

Her eyes narrowed slightly making her look more attractive than usual. "What do you remember?"

"I was walking forward, really angry, and then it gets fuzzy." I was going to get sovery fired. Assaulting a customer on the job was not a plus for the employment record.

"Um," she said, and delicately nibbled on her lower lip for a second, her eyes slightly unfocused, apparently deep in thought. "Um. Right. Well, you were saying things, and you were not amicable to reason, or just about anything else, so we all tried to hold you back, but I could see it wasn't working, so I hit you. Really hard." She tilted her head to the side slightly, "Do you think a man could really survive with his intestines taken outside his body?"

"I guess so," I replied, surprised by her change in topic. "Why?"

"I was wondering. You said that back then, among other things."

"Oh." I said, chilled.

"I, umm," she paused, gnawing her lip before gushing, "This might sound a little odd, but I have to admit I was surprised at some of the ideas, you really are creative in that vein. I am not entirely certain that many of them were physically possible to do, but you looked and certainly sounded like you would try each of them in term just to find out."

"Thank you?"I think?

Again the smile, "You've been out for a few hours now."

"m' father?"

"Gone. He departed the building a little after he could walk again."

"What did you do?"

"To him? Nothing he won't die from. Unfortunately."

"It could be worse." I said morosely as, with dawning horror, I realized how totally screwed I was. The man was right: some days it really didn't pay to get up in the morning.

Ekataren smiled her sweet smile, "Well, granted anything could be worse, if looked at from a different perspective, but the merest thought of anything that could actuallybe worse, I must admit, turns my stomach."

"And yet, he is still my father."

"And still, he is your father. Indeed. Here, let me help you up." Ekataren said, and helped me sit up without too much difficulty. As the world swooped and spun, and my stomach rumbled traitorously, the door opened with a soft chime as Liz slipped through the doors looking forlorn and half frozen.