The cold of the floor made my face burn. It seeped into my jaw, it made my teeth ache, it invaded my head and absorbed my thoughts and I couldn’t tell for certain if I was half awake or half asleep or half dead. The only thing I knew was that I had to get up off of the cold goddamn ground, my brain wasn’t going to allow me think clearly until then.
That was easier said then done. It felt like I was glued to that floor. It felt like I could’ve stayed there for a thousand years, using every ounce of willpower I had left in me, and still not have been able to force my body to do what my brain was so desperately telling it to do.
”Oh quit bein’ such a pussy and get the fuck up!”
That voice, where did it come from? Was that in my head? Or was someone in the room with me? Panic began to set in as I realized I couldn’t remember much of anything. Not my name, or how I got here, or even where “here” was.
“Think goddamnit, think,” I tried to whisper to myself, but all that came out were slurs of syllables I didn’t recognize and what felt like several teeth.
”Well that ain’t very fuckin’ good, huh?”
That voice again. It definitely wasn’t coming from inside my head, I was sure of that now. Which meant that there was someone in the room with me. Someone who could see that I was injured and in pain and just absolutely terrified yet they refused to help me. Did this person put me here?
I took a few deep breaths, my ribs groaned in agony. I tried to make a mental note of every part of my body that hurt. There was my face, which I now believed didn’t just burn because of the cold floor, my ribs, and my left arm, which felt as though it was pinned at an awkward angle underneath my body. The bottom half of my body had no pain, thank God.
I needed to open my eyes. Everything would be okay if I could just open my eyes and get my bearings. Then I would be able remember where I was, how I got here, what had happened to me, and who this fucking asshole was.
I just needed to open my eyes.
I swear I could feel the stitches that held my eyes closed, like the mad man who was in the room with me had sewn them shut. Like I was some rabbit in a science experiment, my only purpose to test the physical limits of pain and suffering.
”You’re so fucking pathetic, you always were and you always will be. Some things just don’t change.”
“Who are you and what did you do to me?!”, I tried to scream to my antagonizer, but again, just mumbles and another tooth were all that fell from my broken mouth.
Slowly and painfully I felt the lid of my right eye begin to break loose, it wasn’t stitched shut after all, just crusty and sand ridden, like it had been closed for months. The blurry world around me refused to come into focus. I could make out a fuzzy silhouette of what appeared to be stairs in the background, leading up to a brightly lit room at the top.
I closed and opened my eye in rapid succession, hoping to clear up my vision, hoping to make sense of things. I felt like I was on the verge of remembering. How long had I been awake now? Was it 30 seconds? Or was it 3 hours? Did it really matter? Time was meaningless when you had no use for it or no frame of reference for it like I did.
”Are you gonna fuckin’ do something today Charles or are you just gonna lay there like the useless sack of shit that you are?”
Charles? Who’s Charles? Now I wasn’t sure if the man in the room was talking to me or someone else. Or am I Charles?
As my vision returned to my working eye I saw a man crouched at the bottom of the stairs. He was draped in darkness and the light coming from the top of the stairs gave the impression of a halo above his head.
”Rise and shine Charles.”
I recognized the voice now. It was a voice I hadn’t heard for many, many years. A voice I had gone to years of therapy to forget. A voice that had taunted me my entire life growing up.
It was the voice of my older brother Frankie.
”Shit, for a minute there I thought you wasn’t gonna wake up at all. Had me worried.”
He walked over to me at that point, put his face directly in front mine and made an overly exaggerated frown. His hand crossed my field of vision as he picked up one of the teeth from the growing pool of blood in front of me.
”Ya know, after what you did to me Charles, I’m really gonna enjoy watching this.”
It wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be.
As I lay there, cold, vulnerable and dying, my memories and hit me all at once, as hard as I must’ve hit the floor after falling down the stairs. My name was Charles Erwin. I was 76 years old and I lived in Lakewood, New Jersey. I never married, I never had children, and I had an older brother named Francis who died when I was 13.
“I’m sorry Francis, I’m so sorry”, I attempted to say, but it came out garbled and unintelligible. It didn’t matter though, because it wasn’t true.
”You left me Charles. How you could do that to your own brother I’ll never understand, but you did it. You fucking left me to drown in that pond like a rat.”
Francis had always been abusive toward me growing up. Physically abusive, mentally, and everything in between. He once beat me so badly that my eye was closed up for two weeks. I told the teachers at school that I had been kicked by the cow when I went to milk her. Francis told me that if I told anyone what really happened he’d kill me, and I believed it.
He built a makeshift fishing boat. It was rough and made out of scrap pieces of barn wood and sheet metal.
“Francis, that doesn’t look safe at all,” I said to him when he suggested we take it out on the pond in the back of our property. “I’m not getting on that thing. Are you insane?”
I had seen Francis angry before, in fact it was pretty much par for the course, but the look of rage on his face when I told him no was something new.
“Listen here you stupid mother fucker, if you don’t get your ass on that boat ill make what I did to your eye look like a love tap.”
Fear is such a powerful tool. I was fearful of what would happen if I got on that boat, but I was even more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
We set out towards the middle of the pond, the deepest part where the fish would most likely be at on such a hot day. The water was still as glass. Francis helped me bait my hook, and for once I thought maybe he wasn’t so bad. Maybe he’d grow out of his aggression and we could be friends.
I made my first cast and let my bobber float on the water and told myself that I there wasn’t a thing in the world I should care about except whether or not that bobber moves.
My left arm burst into pain and felt like it was on fire at the same time my face went into the water. I thrashed and fought and kicked and screamed but it was no use, Francis was too strong.
As he was drowning me the boat began to tip into the water, until it finally breached and began to sink and fall apart. I knew this was my only opportunity to escape because Francis didn’t know how to swim. I used what little strength I had left to get him in the chest and I swam as hard as I possibly could to shore. Francis was calling out to me, pleading for me to come back and save him. I never looked back.
”Like a fucking rat.”
I closed my eye and waited for Francis to do whatever it was that he was going to do to me, whatever revenge he came here to exact from beyond the grave. I waited and waited for I don’t know how long. I opened my eye again and as far as I could tell I was alone. No ghost of my dead brother. Nothing besides me and my empty house which may as well have been my tomb.
I tried to scream again to no avail.
No one was going to come looking for me.
No one was going to call for a wellness check on me.
I was going to die here.
Like a rat.