for him [bxb] ✔️

19 // dreary house

We met on a Sunday.

He had called me with an urgent voice and put on a mask of bravery as his scratchy tone sounded big and above average threatening toward the man he had asked I wouldn't refer to as his father. We were to find each other at the corner of Oak and Montano right outside of the ice cream shop in which Connor has dedicated long hours so his paycheck could be saved towards a better life.

It was a mere surprise when the boy I called Emerald took me to the dried and rotting backyard with a facade of a terrace sitting at the head of the house.

The house stood one story tall with the essence of blue paneling that had since worn old and left the imprint of lost dreams radiating off the now faded brown walls.

The screen door was torn with the wiry patches of impeachment lingering on the sides of the rusting frame and on the faded metallic doorknobs. Below the first door was an old mutt with a brown coat matted with dirt; sleeping on a ripped blue rug with blood caked upon the pads of its paws.

Just inside the dreary house were walls covered in peeling floral wallpaper and indents that covered the interior of the weakly standing structure. Connor later told me they were the imprints of his own body when he was subjected to his father's beatings.

It was inside these peeling walls that we had approached the hungover man still sleeping on the ripped plastic chair with the tv static thrumming to the beat of our hearts.

It was the boy I called Emerald whom I had underestimated.

The boy I called Emerald had more bravery than I could ever imagine and I found myself watching as the otherwise tiny hands of his take a fine welded kitchen knife- cutting into the very life of the putrid man.

It was I who became the role of his accomplice and it was I who helped the previously innocent boy I called Emerald drag the lifeless body of Peter Franta into the hole in the earth just behind the dreary and rusting house.