Jim found the sight of his own blood horrifying. The hunk of flesh missing from his bicep seemed impossible in scope. It bloomed an expanding rose that smeared and ran down toward his hand as he stumbled backward out the door.
Lucas reached for Jim’s foot, which hung in the doorway. It had stuck against the door and the frame as he’d bounced backward down the stairs, landing hard in the snow. Lucas’ fingers were gnarled, bones clenching and straining against his rapidly paling skin.
The fingers worked like jaws, wrapping around Jim’s ankle, their grip unyielding, as he struggled against the shock of the cold. The icy touch penetrated his jeans, the nerves screaming and flaring beneath his skin, and his leg instinctively thrashed out. The heel of Jim’s boot slammed into Lucas’ jaw with a sharp crack. Jim scrambled back, his hands scraping pavement beneath snow. Lucas’ jaw looked dislodged, hanging a little low on the right. Jim’s shock led to pain and horror at the thought of what he’d done to the young man.
Lucas struggled against the doorway. Jim saw after a second that he was in no immediate danger. His son was slow, making stupid, deliberate movements. He struggled to put more than one motion together with another. Finding his way back to a standing position seemed beyond him.
As Jim stared at him, he started to cry. The pain in his arm was excruciating, like a flame stabbed through the limb on a sword. But worse was the cold crushing he felt on his chest as he watched his son’s dark, listing eyes moving over Jim with singular, unthinking brutality.
Jim saw in those eyes Lucas slipping away, disappearing.
“Luke,” he muttered through sobs. “Luke, where are you?”
Lucas pushed his way through the door, belly sliding over the ground as if he were a bloated snake, and flopped down the stairs head first, bouncing with awkward flailing.
It seemed only a few years ago that the two of them had practiced pop-flies in the back yard. Only eighteen months since Lucas had come to Jim, guilt-stricken over shoplifting with a friend and demanding to go to church for confession. Only four days since Jim had sat by Lucas’ bedside while his lungs fought every few seconds to tug in air.
Only minutes ago, Jim watched the light drain from the still, stagnant pools that had become Lucas’ eyes. What was left of him in that husk, Jim couldn’t be sure.
He glanced down. Already Jim saw black bands writhing up his arms, replacing blue veins.
His knees buckled. He dropped into the snow as his son reached for him, just a few feet away.
His vision blurred, and Jim thought about the handgun he kept in the closet in his bedroom. Immediately his stomach heaved. The vision of the gun against Lucas’ head was unbearable.
Jim looked down at his hands. He reached out for the searching limbs, Jim’s fingers stained red – the joints already contracting. The skin already graying.
His hand reached Lucas’, and Jim pulled him in. He wrapped his uninjured arm under Lucas’ chin and held his head tight, despite his jaws’ clenching. Jim felt the yearning in it and shuddered.
Jim’s eyes filled again. The two of them were damned, he thought. The gun wouldn’t change that.
As the cold crept over them and he embraced his son tighter than he ever had before, Jim thought of the gun, and of Lucas, still inside that husk. Jim knew he could see the soul still there.
He would stay here, together with his boy, and wait, Jim decided. He prayed he was right; he prayed this hell was better than what God had planned.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment