This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances by Eric LaRocca

Author:Eric LaRocca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

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After we heaved ourselves from the wounds we had spread from one another, my father and I found ourselves thrashing against the floor like fish captured in a fisherman’s net. When I finally collected myself, I noticed my father had already curled in a corner beside the counter and moored himself there. He shivered, as if frightened, when I drew closer to touch him. He seemed to tremble, as if fearful I might have a desire to go through the ordeal one more time. I petted him softly—assuring him that it was over, that our introduction to one another was finally finished.

I looked down at my palm and wrist, noticing that the wounds which were once open there and blinking constellations at me were now completely absent—as if the skin there had been closed, as if it had never been opened in the first place.

Then I urged my father to lean over, exposing himself to me, and it was then I realized that his wounds, although shrinking, were still present. I brought my fingers close to one of the wounds and it immediately seemed to pout, leaking fluid as dark as motor oil. He writhed there, convulsing violently as if bewitched by an agony I could never and would never want to understand.

When his seizure was finished, I ladled him from the floor and carried him into the living room, where I finally delivered him to my mother’s bed. I arranged his trembling body beside her lifeless corpse and dragged a sheet to cover them both until they were swaddled.

I stared at my father, begging him to say something —anything.

Finally, he opened his eyes and squinted at me, as if perplexed by my presence.

“I like to think of it as if it were a special plant,” he told me. “It grew from a small seedling—planted there probably when I was a little boy—and took from me again and again until it finally bloomed. It’s always been growing in me. In all of us.”

I watched in silence as my father’s wounds shivered slightly. They opened and closed. Then vines and tar-black tendrils poured out of him like dark fluid and began to snake across my mother’s lifeless body until she was finally covered, until her tiny shape had been swallowed completely and she was comfortably swaddled like a precious newborn in a bassinet.

“It’s going to be difficult for things to continue with your mother now gone,” my father whispered. “Your mother kept things together.”

I realized he was right. What would keep us all together now she was gone? Of course, we could try to move on, could try to repair the damage we had done to one another after all these years. But it would be futile. What point was there to go on as if foolishly pretending things would always be the same?

Before another moment of hesitation, I crawled into bed beside my mother and father. My father regarded me with a distinct gentleness I hadn’t seen him possess before—a tenderness that seemed to comfort and astonish me all at once.

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