The Extraordinary by Brad Schaeffer

Author:Brad Schaeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

HURRICANE THOMAS

“How could you let it happen! Huh? Get up, Goddammit!”

These sounds in the haze. Like a dream at first. A familiar voice but distorted, like a cassette tape run at slower speed, giving it a more guttural, demonic quality. I hear a loud thump! And that’s what snaps me out of my fading REM sleep and causes me to bolt upright in my bed.

“Stop it, Tommy!” I hear a squeal of protest. “You’re scaring me!” A slamming door down the hallway. My mother’s room. A furious slapping like an open palm on thin wood, then a more insistent pounding, a balled fist.

“How could you let him do it!” Is that Thomas?

More screams from my mom behind her bedroom door.

“Tommy, please go away! Please!” More pounding. The very house shakes with each hammer blow.

I spring out of bed and race around the corner to encounter Tom’s dark silhouette at the far end of the hall. He’s facing the closed door to Mom’s bedroom and leaning up against it pounding and thumping like a raiding enemy. He has fifty pounds on me. And it’s mostly muscle. He spends a lot of time burning off his excess stress-fueled energy in the gym, as befits his type-A personality, and he strikes me at that moment as an imposing monster in the shadows. He keeps screaming at the door while slamming away. “How couldn’t you see! What the hell kind of wife lets her husband kill himself!” He’s wearing square-toed boots and the flattened tip of his right foot slams against the bottom of the door, causing an audible crack of splintering wood. I howl and cover my ears. “No! No! No!”

“Tommy! What’s wrong with you?” My mother’s voice rings from inside the room again, this time with more desperate urgency, and fear. Fear of her own son whose temper explodes when mixed with alcohol like shaken nitroglycerin.

“Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” I scream as I storm down the hall to confront my enraged brother. One whiff tells me all I need to know. An odor cocktail of stale beer, whiskey, and perspiration exudes from his skin like waves of heat. When he turns to face me, his eyes are on fire and his upper lip curls in a feral snarl. Something in me snaps. My ears hum and the images come at me like strobes. I scream and lurch forward, heaving him off the door, which is right by the stairway. I shove him too hard in my adrenaline rush, and in his drunken disorientation, he falls away to the side and topples down the top of the stairs leading to the first floor. His hand flails in a forlorn attempt to grasp the handrail but misses its mark by a good six inches, and he goes cascading backwards down the steps to end up as a writhing ball of limbs and girth on the ground floor at the base of the stairwell. It all looks so surreal to me in the dark, his

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