Grown
by Brandi Wells
He slams you into the wall and then drags you into the yard yelling, so you think you’re a real man? You think you’re grown?
You tell him no.
He slams you into the side of the house. Into the backdoor. You hear crunching. It’s not just muscle or fat hitting the wall. It’s bone, the back of your skull. You try to slurp snot back into your nose. He says he’ll break you. Make a new doorway with your head.
You stand up straight, because if you slump, he’ll knock you down for being weak. And lazy. Spineless. Sloppy. You never listen.
One morning you hear sobbing. And screaming. Different than the usual screaming. Louder. Wetter. Not scared, but something else.
You get out of bed, wrapping a blanket around yourself, because it’s early, still dark, and you’re cold. Your feet are cold against the hallway tile but you don’t stop and put socks on.
Someone hands you the phone and you see him lying face up, face dark red and lips so purple they’re almost black. The lady on the phone explains how to perform CPR. You bend over his body, trying to blow air into those stiff purple lips. That body, that rigid body with its unblinking stare. Hands and neck and face, all darkened. You keep trying to blow air into him but nothing happens.
You listen to the lady’s instructions and try to blow into his mouth, your lips pressed against his cold ones. You blow and blow and nothing happens. You blow into nothing.
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Brandi Wells has fiction in McSweeney’s, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/
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