Sincerely, Mike

08: Revenge Is No Solution

The next morning, Mike was begrudgingly ripped from the untouched limbo of sleep by the unsettling yet unmistakable cacophony that the sounds of cold, bitter rain beating down on an old tin roof and an infamously terrible Spazzy meltdown combined and swelled to create.

Fully awake but lacking both the interest and the will to peel himself off the couch and force himself into yet another depressive episode of a day, Mike stayed glued to the couch and hidden under the thin blanket someone must have draped over him after he had fallen asleep until Jason, already noticeably irritated from having to deal with Spazzy, stomped up the stairs and quite literally dragged him out of the spare room.

After having been corralled into the bathroom and ordered to wash up and somehow fix the apparently inexcusable fact that he looked like "living death", Mike was surprisingly quick to oblige, hoping that even a routine and mundane action like brushing his teeth would delay the projection of the previous day's horror show and all the emotional baggage that came with it onto every last inch of the walls of his mind for hours on end at least the smallest bit.

Unfortunately, fate didn't exactly see to that.

Before the thoughts became too overwhelming, he was quick to flee the scene of the bathroom, hoping to maybe make a worthwhile distraction out of heading downstairs for some breakfast.

Stepping over tumbleweeds of cat hair and scattered toys, he was quick to scale the stairs and step through the threshold of the kitchen, a crescendo of overwhelming sounds and smells greeting him with a sharp slap across the face.

Sizzling bacon. Falling rain. Baking waffles, brewing coffee. Jason's daughters giggling and playing with the dog just down the hall. Good Morning America blaring on a nearby television, a tulip-scented candle. Spazzy's incessant crying, Jason's wife's exasperated sighs, the irritated and impatient tapping of Jason's fingers on the kitchen table.

Even the severity of his own thoughts added to the mess of background noise that was pounding angrily on the eardrums of his sanity.

What a beautiful morning.

Quietly, he slunk towards an empty chair next to Jason and took a seat, never once lifting his eyes from the floor as he fought a hard, losing battle with the mechanisms of his mind to keep the awful images and any thoughts of Billie at bay.

Sensing the conflict in Mike's heart and attempting quell the frustration in his own, Jason was quick to strike up conversation, grumbling gruffly to his friend, "I swear to God, if Spazzy doesn't fucking stop crying, I'm gonna do what Billie did that one time and-"

"You're gonna what, Jason White?" his wife interjected coarsely, appearing out of seemingly nowhere (at least to Mike) with the screaming child on her hip and plopping a plate piled high with waffles in front of Jason almost carelessly.

"Nothing, Dear," Jason grumbled, looking between his equally flustered wife and the plate of waffles that sat in front of him with a flat frown on his face. "Nothing at all."

Sliding the plate towards himself once he was sure his wife was out of earshot, Jason dug his fork into the fluffy cakes stacked up in front of him, saying to the now essentially unresponsive Mike, "I swear, how does anyone put up with the kid for more than 24 hours? Sure, he's cute, but in small doses, it only lasts so long! All he ever does is cry and whine and be nothing but a goddamn burden on the rest of us...don't get me wrong, I felt bad at first, but now it's just driving me fucking insane..."

Jason laughed dryly to himself as he shoveled a large helping of a waffle into his mouth.

"He really is just fucking like Billie."