The Door to Dawn

I arrive at the house. It is new again. The porch door swings open. I am welcome. For the first time, I am unafraid.

“I’m home,” I proclaim loudly as I enter.

The house is silent. My voice echoes through its emptiness. Except for a few empty cans of Vienna Sausages and a crumpled-up bag of potato chips, there is no sign of the man. I hope that he’s gone. I’ll have her to myself. Before, all I could say was “I’m sorry.” Now, I can protect her.

I open the door to her bedroom. The carpet is folded over again. There is a lump in the middle. Kneeling, I reach for the edges of the carpet with blood-stained hands that don’t seem to belong to me anymore.

“Did you miss me?” I whisper as I unfold the carpet.

My heart explodes. I jump back as if a rattlesnake is about to strike. Curled up in a ball, encircled by empty beer bottles, the man clutches my mother’s tattered rainbow dress.

“Where is she?” I yell, yanking the dress away. “Wake up!” I kick his boot in anger. He rolls over then snorts awake, yawns and smacks his lips.

“Eric, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“Where is she?”

He stretches. His simple response expands like a rubber band—snaps back.

“Gone,” he says.

“Where? Bring her back.”

“I threw her away. Out back, down the well. She was starting to stink.”

Clutching the dress, I stumble over to the couch and collapse. Feeling some sort of guilt, the man begs understanding.

“You can’t get too attached,” he continues. “All good things come to an end. We had some fun. Played a game. Nobody got hurt.”

“I brought her back to life,” I say to no one, still clutching my mother’s dress.

“Yeah, you did, and you can do it again and again. There’s more fish in the sea. We’ll start tomorrow. Early bird gets the worm.”

“Why? I could’ve brought her back.”

“We’ll find another, together. I’ll let you kill her this time, too.”

“All this was for nothing?”

Now a third voice speaks. A voice outside the house. A voice that is both strange and familiar.

“Eric?” The voice questions. The voice demands. The voice calls out a name in anger, not concern.

I barely raise an eyebrow. What’s the point? There’s no punishment he could inflict or impose that would equal what I’ve done.

“Your old man?” the man asks through a smile.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“Don’t answer. Let him come to us.”

Clearly, in my head, I see him approaching the house. Uprooted trees shaken like giant pom-poms collapse to the ground. They make a path for the howling beast emerging from the woods. I would be able to hear him from miles away or from where I stand in the bedroom of the house. Crashing through the redneck graveyard he flips cars in his wake. He passes around to the front of the house huffing and puffing like a train coming into station.

When he reaches the poison apple tree his voice dives to a deeper displeasure, something closer to rage.

“Eric, are you in there? Come out now!”

“Kinda angry ain’t he,” the man whispers.

I exhale.

“You don’t know.”

My mother’s rainbow dress is a twisted knot in my hands. The porch’s floorboards bend and creak under the weight of his arrival. The door screams open. He’s in the house.

Out of habit, assuming my usual “wait-till-your-father-gets-home” place, I stumble to a corner of the room and face the wall, but not before I see the man reach for the knife in his boot.

“What are you doing?”

“Let’s catch us a monster!”

“Yes,” I whisper to the wall.

“Stand over here. I can handle him.”

The man grabs me by the scruff of the neck and plants me dead center of the room. I’ve become the bait. I am a sapling with stunted growth. The woods tower over me. I am born of an acorn from a tree that bears a name carved into its bark.

“Call to him.”

The man’s eyes twinkle with a mystery. He’s playing a game. If I’m playing, too, I don’t want to lose. I do what he says.

“Dad, in here!” My voice sounds alien. Like I’m doing a bad imitation of myself. For once, I want him to come to me.

The man plasters himself against the wall next to the door. The crystal doorknob turns. Dad storms in. The woods have stripped away the man I know. The man who has always prided himself on his immaculate dress. In his pursuit of me his clothes are now torn. I envision the forest attacking him in an attempt to prevent him from following me. His shirt is untucked and soaked through with sweat. Droplets of blood dot the damp white fabric. His pants hang below his belly. His spit-shined shoes are caked with mud.

“Eric, what are you doing? Why didn’t you answer me?”

“Hey Pops!” the man shouts.

Before dad can react the butt of the knife smashes against his skull. He collapses to the floor, like an imploding building, in a cloud of dust. His impact is devastating. The house rattles.

“Got ‘em!”

When the dust clears dad is sprawling like an oversized ragdoll waiting to be played with. Leap-frogging over him a couple of times, the man plops down and straddles his belly.

“Quick, we gotta tie him up. Give me that.”

The man rips my mom’s rainbow dress from my hands and tears it into long strips.

“Tie his feet.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You’ve come this far.” The man looks at me with something like disappointment.

“What are you going to do?”

I know what he’s going to do. What I’d always wanted to do. What I’d dreamed of doing.

“I don’t know? Kill em, I guess? Let’s shed some skin,” the man says, throwing up his hands like a kid who offers to play a familiar game to avoid the boredom of making plans. I can’t stop the man. I don’t want to stop him. A chant sings in my head. Not sharp enough. Not sharp enough. Not sharp enough.

“Let me do it.”

The man smiles with what I’ve heard is referred to as a shit-eating grin.

“Eric, now I know why I didn’t kill you. You’re one crazy kid.”

We kneel together at the motionless lump that is the altar of my dad. The man presents the knife to me. It is as familiar in my hand now as a toothbrush or baseball bat.

Dad’s eyes flutter open. He looks at me, confused. He has slept through the first half of the movie and doesn’t understand the plot.

“Don’t open your eyes or you’ll be dead.”

He struggles against the twisted ropes of the rainbow dress.

“Eric?”

Dad’s voice searches through the closets and drawers of my head trying to find his son. But it’s drowned out by the chant of another.

“Kill em! Kill him! Kill him!”

The man is a jack-in-the-box about to explode and I’m winding the handle. If I let go, he will become a balloon bouncing in the air.

“Shut Up! I’m thinking.”

“Okay, Okay, but do something.” He takes a deep breath and forces himself to calm down.

I betray myself. The man lying in front of me is not a monster, he’s my dad. I can do anything I want to him, but all I want to do is let him go and be his son again.

In the blade’s reflection is the woman’s lifeless body. My lips curl. I bite down until they bleed. My eyebrows arch. I decide. The knife is lifted over my head. I will sacrifice him to whatever god or devil he deserves.

“If you die, can I bring you back?”

I shift and drive the blade down into the man’s neck.

“Sharp enough,” I mutter.

A pulsating fountain of blood explodes from the man’s neck. He attempts to control the bleeding, but his hand makes for a poor bandage. I can’t help but think he must, even now, hold onto some satisfaction in the end. The man had planted the seed and watched it grow. I pull out the knife in a spray of red. He collapses to the floor and curls up like a dying bug. Blood pours from the wound and gathers in a puddle. I hear it dripping on the dirt under the house as it slips between cracks in the floor boards. There will be no resurrection for the man.

“Eric, Eric.”

“What?” I feel as if I’ve just woken from a coma.

“Untie me, son.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I slip the knife under the knotted fabric binding his hands. The blade slides across the rainbow colors, tearing and peeling the fabric apart. I stop before finishing, grabbing dad by the hair and yanking his head back.

“I understand now!” I hiss.

I place the blade of the knife under his chin.

“Snake skin. It’s her snakeskin.”

“Eric, stop! What are you talking about?” He chokes out the words as the dull edge of the blade presses into his Adams’s apple.

“It wasn’t the dress. She didn’t want you to see it was her. When mom stood in front of the three-way mirrors at the department store, when she sat in front of her vanity, she didn’t want you to see the layers of welts and scars, the purple and black bruises. The dress exposed those. Why ask for more punishment? The dress was her snakeskin. She put it on and the colors made her skin disappear…Dad, if you die, can I bring you back?”

Before he can answer I rake the blade across his throat. I am bathed in a rain of blood. I push dad’s convulsing body away and it slumps to the floor.

My adventure in the house ends as it began. In the mirror, I kneel over a body. His chest rises and sinks. I count the movements waiting for them to stop. I want to speak, to say something important, but nothing comes to mind. In this moment, I do what comes naturally. I lay next to him. He blinks his eyes—tries to fix me in their final stare. I don’t think he understands. Do monsters ever really understand anything?

I understand. His death comforts me with each blood-choked breath.

I stumble out of the house to the well—a solar eclipse of black in a sky clouded with grass and weeds. Vines shrivel into its blackness, dying from lack of sun. A stray thought enters my mind. Once we threw a rock down the well. We never heard it hit bottom.

She is falling. She will always fall.