SNUFF

The Past

I lifted the sleeve of my shirt, revealing the death's-head moth tattoo I had gotten when I was nineteen and looked back up to the TV screen to compare. It was undeniable that the tattoo was mine but still I looked back and forth trying to find a discrepancy. How? Was the first question that popped into my head. How could I have done this if I didn't remember? Why? Why would I do this? My heart beat uncontrollably as the questions began to pile up for what seemed like the millionth time.

"If you didn't stay out all god damn night, you would sleep at home and not at work." My mother's words from a few days prior came back to me suddenly. When she had said it then, I brushed it off as nothing. My mother had a bad habit of making me feel guilty for the time I didn't spend with her. Does she know more than I do? I got up from the floor on wobbling legs and made my way back down to the kitchen where my mother was eating. She grimaced at the vomit still on my shirt and put down her fork.

"What do you want?" She rolled her eyes.

"I – I" I stammered out as I crashed to the floor in sobs. Concerned, she immediately came to my side, putting an arm around my shaking shoulders.

"Honey, what happened?" She asked.

"I don't know what happened," I choked out "I can't remember – but it was me. I did it." My mother let out a sigh and pulled me into her chest, cradling me like a child.

"I know." She spoke softly.

"What?" I pulled away from my mother and looked at her. "What do you mean, you know?" I narrowed my eyes to slits. How could she have known?

"Who do you think cleans up after you, Jeremy?" The realization of my mother being my accomplice hit me like a brick wall. Nausea washed over me once more and I held back the urge to vomit.

"And you never thought to tell me or try to stop me?" I hissed. I felt betrayed and even more so, angry. Why were these secrets coming out now?

"Don't you see what I've done for you?" She raised her voice in frustration and rose to her feet. "You had a normal life despite being abnormal – you have flown under the radar for years!"

"Do you really think you would have been better to know?" She scoffed. "You would have been in jail by now! All I have ever done for you is give you a life that you deserve. That we deserve." She stopped talking for a moment and looked at me with her hands on her hips. I didn't know what to say to her. I was speechless.

"Your father was a bad man." My mother reached out to touch my face "He used to hurt you a lot, you can't blame yourself for turning out the way you did. I could only do so much for you. I thought that maybe because you were so young when it happened, that you would –" She paused trying to find the right word. " – recover. I thought that having me was enough, that those little years in your life that he was, couldn't affect you. But it did. It affected you more than I thought imaginable." The thought of my father made my skin crawl. I didn't have very many memories of the man, but one stood out from the many that had been repressed. It was summer, it was my sixth birthday and I had still not learned how to swim. My father had a bright idea to bring me out into the middle of the lake and throw me in. He said, "that's how you learn, boy" as he watched me drown. Only before I lost consciousness, he reached in and pulled me out. Later that night, as we sat around the dinner table, he recounted the story to my mother, telling her that I was a pathetic excuse of a man. My mother tried to defend me, telling him that I was young and that I could be put into swimming lessons if he wanted me to learn how to swim. Unimpressed, my father rose to his feet slapped my mother across the face so hard that she fell out of her chair. Scared, she screamed at me to hide and from the confines of my bedroom closet, I could hear my father unleashing his wrath on the poor woman who felt bad for her son.