Salamander

Chapter Nine: The Killing

Chapter Nine

My father was standing over a body – a body with a silhouette that I knew all too well for me to recognize without seeing it in bright light and further up close. The frail arms, the messy, long hair, and the wrinkled, white dress was all unmistakable.

            Mother.

Mother.

Her body was in between the coffee table and the rickety, out-of-tune piano, and I could see a black puddle snake out of her torso and break off into hundreds of tiny streams. The metallic smell that hung in the air told me that it was the same liquid that was smeared across my father’s face: blood. Sticky, warm blood. And there was so much of it. The tiny streams rolled down across the floorboards and eventually reached my feet. I lifted my foot and, since there wasn’t such a great concentration of it, I could see that the blood wasn’t black, but a bright, crimson red. I set my foot back down and swallowed, but the saliva wouldn't go down. It just stayed in my throat, causing me to cough violently and put my free hand against my mouth.

            My eyes wandered up and I saw that my father was holding a knife, the metal shimmering in the moonlight that flittered in through the window.

            “Father . . .” I could feel my jaw snap open. “What did you . . . ?” I leaned over, ready to vomit yet again. But there was nothing left for my stomach to give up, and I ended up just gagging violently and coughing up a couple of dribbles of saliva.

            I expected my father’ eyes to be wild and angry, but they were anything but that. In fact, they were shocked, as if he couldn’t bring himself to believe what he had just done.

            I cleared my throat. “Father! What the fuck did you do?!” I felt my voice falter when the curse word came out of my mouth. I wasn’t used to saying such words outside of my inner dialogue. But it came past my lips, and it seemed to hover in the air for a couple moments before disappearing altogether.

            I heard the sound of metal clashing against a hard surface, and when I looked down, I saw that my father had dropped the knife. It was positioned only a couple centimeters away from my mother’s pale, white hand. It was scary how much she looked like a ghost, like something unrecognizable.

            He opened his mouth to speak, but only a couple of incoherent words came out, long and drawn like it was a struggle for him to use his voice.

            “What the fuck did you do?!” I repeated, this time screaming at the top of my breathless lungs. And then something happened – I could no longer feel the pain rushing through my muscles, I could no longer feel the lack of air in my chest, I could no longer feel the throbbing in my temples. I could only feel anger. Hot, blistering anger that traveled from my head all the way down to my toes.

            I took one effortless step after the other, my adrenaline pushing out the pain and leaving me to focus on the anger that continued to possess my body. In one, swift movement, I struck my father in the head with my cane. He let out a moan and fell to the ground. Hard. I dove over my mother’s body and snatched the knife, just where my father had dropped it. And then, before I could even begin to think through the anger and stop myself from what I was about to do, I jumped for my father and drove the knife into his chest. His mouth opened as wide as it could go, and his green, hazel eyes expanded to the point where I almost convinced myself that they were going to pop right out of their sockets. He let out a weak breath, and I could tell that he was trying to tell me something.        

            “What the fuck do you have to say to this?” I shouted, the tears now coming to my eyes. They streamed down my face and landed on my father’s cheeks, merging with the tears that were already on his face. “This is your fault!” My voice was becoming unbearably shaky, and it was beginning to diminish in volume from a loud yell to a soft whimper. “This is your fault. . .” My father put his hand up, a movement that made me almost sure that he was aiming to slap me across the face for probably the hundredth time in my life. I was glad that I didn’t stop him in time, because I was able to see what he was trying to do; he was caressing my cheek. Actually caressing, the first form of love he had ever shown me in the long, sixteen years I had lived with him. “Alan,” he struggled to say. “. . . I . . . k-know.”