Life in Rewind by Terry Weible Murphy

Author:Terry Weible Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The best thing would be if everything in life was recorded—and God had a big rewind button, so he could say, “Sit in the corner, both of you. Stop being knuckleheads!”

—ED ZINE

CHAPTER 9

History of Pain

I HOPE YOU FUCKING DIE!” It was a brutal, heart-stopping exclamation spoken in a moment of blind rage, but Ed’s heart couldn’t discern that fact. The careless expletive that tumbled so easily from his father’s lips—words that would eventually be forgiven, but never forgotten—resulted in an adrenaline-induced panic, kicking into high gear Ed’s time equation obsession and triggering an explosion of new, more intense rituals.

Bob was upstairs; he had come into the house that morning angry about something, and Ed remembers hearing him open the door and screaming down the stairs at the top of his lungs. Within seconds, a black plastic bag, filled with garbage, came flying down the stairs into the basement. It went boomeranging off the walls of the landing and straight into the Running Man laser disc, which was sitting up against the television set in the exact same place it had been the night that Zeus died. It had taken Ed nearly two months to reset it perfectly in place after his father moved it while he was in the hospital.

The echoes of his father’s anger were all too familiar, and the episode, once again, brought Ed right back to the night of his mother’s death. Ed was overcome by sudden terror. The irony was that while Ed’s obsessive condition would of course bring heartache to any parent, Ed’s mess, which represented chaos to everyone but Ed, ran counter to his ex-wartime marine father’s own apparent form of OCD, which, as long as the Zine kids could remember, could only be appeased by a strict regimen of cleanliness and a more traditional definition of order and semblance.

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