I, Death

Monday October 22, 2012 - 4:04 AM

I moped around the house for hours, waiting for Uncle Bob to either return home or call. At first, I’d wondered why he hadn’t called my cell phone, but then I remembered that they’d taken away my cell phone and canceled my service plan when I’d been grounded. And it hadn’t been reinstated. And in his message, Uncle Bob hadn’t mentioned what hospital they were at.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time, staring at the phone and the sink, which was still filled with water. It was dirty water, no longer sudsy, and the frying pan that Aunt Shelly had been cleaning when I’d left was still sitting on the counter.

I wanted to pick up the phone, start calling hospitals, find out where they were, but I kept looking at that frying pan, at the sink full of water. Aunt Shelly must have had her heart attack very shortly after I’d left. I mean, my breakfast dish, half-eaten eggs covered with ketchup and a few curly pieces of bacon, still sat on the table, the fork and knife not even moved an inch from where I’d slammed them down in anger.

I kept looking back at the phone.

But I couldn’t bring myself to call the hospitals. To find them.

I couldn’t stand to face Uncle Bob.

Not after what I’d done to Aunt Shelly.

When he finally returned home, not even an hour after midnight, I’d been standing in the living room in front of the television, a picture of Aunt Shelly and Uncle Bob in my hands. I’d don’t remember picking it up, this picture that had sat, for as long as I could remember, on top of the television set in the living room, but I was holding it my hands when Uncle Bob arrived.

It was a black and white picture of Uncle Bob and Aunt Shelly. They were standing in front of a Christmas tree. A real one, not an artificial one. And they were young, really young. Perhaps it was a picture taken before they were even married. I certainly couldn’t tell where the picture was taken, but it didn’t look at all like the house we were in now.

When Uncle Bob came in, I’d been studying their young faces which had been so full of love. The same type of open and eager love that they’d given me for as long as I’d known them — love that I had never truly acknowledged or even properly returned to them.

The pain in my heart grew as I realized that I’d never told Aunt Shelly, not in recent years at least, how much I loved her. The pain of that knowledge was intense, difficult to come to terms with.

It was when I was looking at that picture that Uncle Bob came in.

I was standing in the living room and he was standing in the kitchen — and, across both rooms, we looked at each other. Without him having to say a thing, I knew that Aunt Shelly was dead. And I knew that a part of his heart had died.

His wife — his best friend, his whole life — was gone.

He looked deeply into my eyes, searching for something, perhaps for hope, for pity, for comfort.

Instead, he found terror.

Because he suddenly backed away, his blood-shot eyes widening dramatically.

The look on his face were as if he was staring at the devil himself rather than his nephew, the buddy he’d recently spent so much time enjoying movies with.

He backed into the refrigerator, his hand suddenly clutching his chest, and he fell to one knee. The crunch of his nose on the kitchen floor tile as he pitched forward sent shivers down my spine, and I screamed at the top of my voice, but knowing I was too late, too damn late.

“Uncle Bob — I love you!”

[The rest of this novel will continue to be rolled out on a regular basis here on Wattpad, but if you can't wait to read it, the print and eBook version is available through all major online retailers - Atomic Fez's page (with links) is here:  http://www.atomicfez.com/book-catalogue/9781927609033.html]