by Brandi Wells

She told me he passed out drunk afterwards. He woke to bright lights and the smell of ammonia. A doctor informed him he had been stabbed fourteen times in the abdomen.

They divorced and she was awarded custody.

A decade has passed and I look out my bedroom window every night to see if he is asleep in our yard. I take a flashlight to be sure he isn’t in the ditch or underneath her car. While she’s at work I try to dig a trench around the house, but the grass is too well-rooted. I stab at it with a hoe, but I hack my foot and have to quit. She finds me sitting in the foyer, still wearing my sneakers, bleeding through them. I scream when she takes the shoe off. I scream at the way the shoe rips away more of my flesh.

I watch for him everywhere. At home, yes, I stare out the windows, running from room to room trying to catch him in the side yard or front yard. I check the closets and underneath the bed. I watch for him at school. I’m afraid to go to the bathroom by myself, because maybe he will be in a stall choking my mother. On a field trip my school takes to the sewage treatment plant, I’m sure I’ll find him drowning her in a vat of chemicals.

And then I realize I haven’t seen him because he can change his size and shape. He can be in a kitchen drawer or underneath the towels in the hall closet. He could be anyone. Anything. He might be in the breadbox or maybe inside my toy chest. If he is in the other room choking my mother, I will never know.

The easiest thing to do is sprint from room to room and around the house, on constant vigil, awaiting his appearance. When I tire of sprinting, I jog. Then I walk. I do this until I fall asleep.

It doesn’t work at school. Teachers get antsy. They demand my attention. They want me to answer questions and sit still in my seat. They want me to learn multiplication tables so my rocket ship can fly across the bulletin board, across the times-fours and times-fives and eventually the times-twelves. They try to send me to the principal’s office, but of course someone finds me power-walking through the halls, looking around and up and behind me. My mother is called. They want me to take Ritalin. They want me to talk to someone.

I’m scared that when we walk through the therapist’s door, it will be him. He will be there, ready. But it isn’t him. I try to talk to the therapist. I do. But he wants the same things the teachers want. He wants me to sit still and answer questions and pay attention. I can’t do it.

I think of leaving. I think of hitching out at night, but it won’t solve anything. My mother will still be there, waiting to be strangled by my father, who is hiding in every possible location.

There’s no solution. I’m writing this between patrols of the clinic, in order to explain myself. To explain why I can’t be kept here, to explain why my presence is so vital to my mother’s well being.

But the worst? The truth of it all? I’ve never seen my father. I have no idea what he looks like. He could be my therapist. He might be one of the guards. Maybe the neighbor. It isn’t safe for my mother to be near any of these men.

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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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