Down Into the Sea by Dan Franklin & Cemetery Dance Publications

Author:Dan Franklin & Cemetery Dance Publications [Franklin, Dan & Publications, Cemetery Dance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2024-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE:

The enormity of what Yarrow said didn’t settle on Eric until he was halfway home.

He had pulled a knife on them. He had taken the blade out and had planned to… to what? To stab them for making his life miserable? If they had fought him, someone would probably have died. He could have killed them. He could have ended up just like his dad. And all for what? A handful of magazines and a torn backpack? A rock collection?

His mom’s car was missing from out front. She must have picked up a shift at the gas station, he supposed. Home alone.

He didn’t realize he was crying until he was stumbling through the front door, but he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t wipe away the tears that blurred his vision before the next wave replaced them. Couldn’t stop the ugly throb of shame. His dad wouldn’t have cried.

He did not go to his room.

He went down the hallway to his parents’.

He kicked aside the laundry baskets as he went, the lumps of rough, musty towels that would end up being nesting spots for mice, Eric supposed. He’d seen their little bodies scrambling around more and more often lately, the tiny rice-grain flecks of brown they left behind dotting the base boards and clustered in dusty corners.

He flipped the light switch, but nothing happened. The lightbulbs had been cannibalized for other rooms.

No great loss. There was nothing much to see. Nothing new, anyway. Just more disuse. More shame. More waste and wreckage, unwashed sheets and pill bottles, his mother’s dirty underclothes strewn around. He tried not to look at any of it as he went to his dad’s side of the bed. Not at the unmade bed where he’d once listened to his parents read simple books to him as he nestled between their warm bodies, not at the dressers his dad had sanded and stained a few years back, definitely not at the forest of family photos that sat on top of them. He didn’t want to see the pictures. His mother, pregnant and dressed in white lace. His father proud in Army greens. A framed polaroid of a four-year-old Tiffany holding him for the first time, when he was still mewling and pink and messy from birth. The four of them smiling and sunburned at the beach near New Bedford. Younger, stronger, all full of life and hope. He didn’t want to see their lie that things turned out happily ever after. The people in those photographs were dead.

He ran his hand along the back of the nightstand until he felt the nail his father had tapped into the wood, the key hanging from it.

He palmed it and headed to the closet.

The light bulb inside had been spared, blinked to life when he tugged the chain.

Behind the wall of button-down shirts and jackets, the great door stood—a gray behemoth with a brass wheel for a handle that looked like a part of a ship’s helm.

He twisted the key in the lock, spun the wheel and the ponderously heavy door creaked open.

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