Don't Clean the Aquarium! by Osier Jeffrey

Author:Osier, Jeffrey [Osier, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2011-04-10T21:00:00+00:00

SNOWLIGHT

My father was dead. Freshly dead. My family was reeling with an unpalatable and unpredictable mixture of shock, grief, and resentment. More and more I tried to keep away from them, just as more and more of them kept piling off of planes and trains and I began to realize just what a big, monstrous brood my family really was. Relatives who remembered me only as a baby—if at all—were suddenly scrutinizing me, correcting me, reproaching me and just measuring me all the way around, wondering how this scrawny, sullen twelve-year-old was going to be anything but a hindrance to his poor, grief-stricken mother.

Beyond that, my father's death was something that officially had very little to do with me. It was talked about all the time in my presence, but I never entered into these talks. His death, my mother's difficult situation, even the problem of… me; it was as though they were speaking a language I wasn't supposed to understand.

And so no one noticed the disease, the cavity opening in my mind—no one except my mother, who in several instances seemed to recognize a malevolence in the emptiness of my eyes. She never did anything about it—didn't talk to me about it, didn't even talk around it. It was as if she refused to acknowledge it.

Within two weeks of my father's death a dozen blackheads erupted on my face, I got my first gray hair, and I had one of my molars shattered in a schoolyard fight. I could feel an ugly momentum building in me, and I saw nothing in my path to hinder its acceleration. The moment I surrendered to it, I realized I actually liked it. Preferred it, in fact.

It was 1967, the winter of the big snow that paralyzed all of Chicagoland and turned the children's world into a vast alien wasteland of snowdrifts and abandoned cars. My friends and I basked in the pain and the glory of the big snow. We shoplifted from the barren stores in the mall, skitched, and pelted houses, cars, and helpless adults with snowballs.

On January 27th, we scaled the drift-slopes at the edge of the mall parking lot up onto a deserted, drift-covered Eisenhower Expressway, where we waved our arms in defiance, smoked Marlboros with the filters broken off, and talked about what we'd do if we caught a car struggling through the drifts.

My own suggestion was to torture and kill the occupants, cook them in the blaze of their ignited automobile, eat them, make jewelry and weapons from their bones, and use the wreckage as a barricade for our next victims. I was just kidding. It was the kind of thing a kid like me, with my reading and TV habits, would consider a joke. But my friends, constantly reveling in their fantasies of sex, vandalism, and street-fighting, were appalled by my suggestion and let me know it in no uncertain terms.

Normally I'd have been considered far too weird to be part of that gang, though I'd been moving along its fringes for the last year or so.

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