Heart Burns

Chapter 10

"What the hell is going on?" A slam of the door, and the scream ringing in my ear woke me. I wipe the blurriness out of my eyes and see Carol standing over me, her face red with anger. My mind goes to Shawn in a split second, and my eyes dart to the other side of the couch. The only signs of his existence are his bloody paper towels. "Get up!" Carol grabs my forearm and drags me to my feet. "You were supposed to clean this house last night." She growls in my face, and her breath smells like rotting food. "I fell asleep. I'm sorry." I plead, but she doesn't show me any mercy. "You worthless piece of garbage." She back slaps me in the face. The sting on my cheek hurts less than the insults she spews at me. "You clean this place up. When I wake up, this house will be shining or I will beat the shit out of you." She throws me back on the couch and makes her way to her room, stripping one piece of clothing at a time, leaving them in the hallway. I stay where I am until she slams her door shut. I let out the breath I am holding and stand up. I gather up the paper towels on the couch and bring them to the kitchen. Somehow, she managed to make the house even messier in the few minutes she had been awake. I look at the clock and see it's only five o'clock. I sigh and start to clean up each room one by one, scrubbing at already spotless places. Jayden walks into the kitchen just as I finish washing the mountain of dishes in the sink. "Brea." His face is splotchy, and he's rubbing at his eyes. "Hey, squirt." He holds out his short arms toward me, and I pick his up with soapy hands. "What's wrong?" I ask him, and he hides his face in my collarbone. I rub his back, and he puts his thumb in his mouth, a coping habit that he had created last year. I rock him in my arms as I wash the floors. I sing to him as I pick up loose garbage in the house, and I tell him stories about Buzz Lightyear as I put the dishes away, one by one. He finally knocks out and I place him in his bed, tripping over spilled books. I curse and start to pick them up and put them on his bookshelf in his closet. I bring a tower to the door and one of them falls out of my grasp. It falls, opening its pages and something falls out. I crouch down and pick up a syringe. "Are you serious?" I whisper, and pick up the book that had fallen. It was one of the Boxcar books, a tiny hole torn into one of the chapters. I can tell that the needle has already been used more than once, and I notice capsules in a baggie jammed into the hole. I put everything back into the book and walk out of the house. I go down the road until I'm at the big brick wall. I hide on one side so no passing cars see me. I reach into the pockets of my jacket I grabbed before I left and pull out a lighter. I hold the book up by the spine and set one of the pages on fire. "Oh, yes," cried Benny. "I liked her a lot. But that's different. I think Joe is going to marry her." The fire eats at the ink. I place it on the ground when the flames lick my fingertips. I have a little box of matches in my other pocket, so I light three and throw it on the growing fire. It catches onto the dying grass around my feet, and I wait until my toes can feel the warmth in my boots to stomp out the small flames. The pages are curling and falling to the ground into ash. I can see the needle as the flames get higher and the cover of the book melts. The needle is burning bright until it shrivels into itself. I leave when the book of children is ash and the syringe is a ball of plastic.