Painting Flowers for Juliet Sky { on hold }

ii: James

ii: James

    It hurts to write.
    My bruised knuckles scream out in pain as I clench my pencil, scribbling the notes from the blackboard as quickly as I can. I thought they would have disappeared over the weekend, but here I sit on this chilly Monday afternoon, bones still aching beneath the dark purple spots.
    I sigh and lay the pencil down on my desk. I flex my hand and watch as the bruises shift in color; first to a mossy green, then to a blue as ominous as the night sky. The piercing pain that shoots up my arm is a strong reminder of that Friday night, and suddenly my mind is once again consumed with the past; that is all I seem to live in these days.
    The fight started over ground beef. Even from my room upstairs, I could hear my mom's voice over the sound of sizzling meat.
    "This is the same kind I always buy," she was defending.
    "No, it isn't," my dad argued. Then their voices faded away for a moment, and I breathed a sigh in relief and unpaused my music. The Beatles' All You Need is Love began playing just as I heard the hand smack the counter.
    "Don't you dare raise your voice at me, Kristen." My dad's voice ran through the house and burrowed itself deep into the plaster of every neutral-colored wall. That's when I knew we were in for another bad one; he only used her full name when he was angry, when he was looking for a fight. He called her Krissy usually, and before the accident, he would often call her "Krismas" just because he loved the way she smiled and shook her head when the nickname fell from his lips.
    "I'm sorry," I heard my mom mutter weakly. That was another new development. When the fights first started, she would rage with just as much fire as he did, but after the punches and shoves and burns exploded from some deep, grief-stricken part of my father, she became timid and would do almost anything to avoid another bruise she would have to explain to her clients.
    I turned the music up and squeezed my eyes shut. I mouthed the words to the song and tapped the beat on the edge of my notebook. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game...
    Something fell in the kitchen. Something heavy, something that cried out as it went down.
    I raised the volume even more, screaming the words soundlessly into the thick, suffocating air of that house, pounding my fists into my lead-smeared homework. Nothing that you can see that isn't shown, nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be, all you need is love, all you need is love, all you need is love...
    I heard another howling yell and a sharp bang and before I could even think I was bursting from my room and taking the stairs two at a time.
    "Get away from her!" I growled as I shoved him into the granite countertop of the kitchen. He was stunned, and fell back into the smoothed edges of the stone with cold eyes and half-moon lips.
    "James, please, just go back to your room, I can handle it," my mom sobbed from the floor. My eyes snagged on a few tiny drops of crimson puddled calmly on the pristine white marble.
    Blood.
    Deep red washed over my vision, tainting everything with the grotesque color. The air in the room turned acrid, and all of the sunlight in the room diminished until his crooked face was all I could see.
    "How dare you," I growled, teeth bared like some untamed animal. He barely had the time to stand up straight before my clenched fist connected with his jaw.
    "Stop!" I vaguely heard my mom cry out again as my father stumbled back. Shock exploded across his features; his eyes were wide, milky moons stuffed into his face, mouth hung open like a trapdoor. A sick sense of satisfaction flooded through me at the sight of blood trickling down the side of his lip.
    But then I turned, and my eyes fell on the crumbling heap of my mother, curled upon the cold floor. She was staring at me in absolute horror, and that look froze me; that was the way she had looked at my father when this all began.
    "I'm sorry," I mumbled quickly, groping the wall behind me until the steel door knob that led out to the garage hit my hand.