Fear is subjective. It can be a fly, buzzing incessantly in your ear, easily swatted away. Or it can be a wound. A blistering scab, oozing and never healing because no matter how many times you are told to leave it alone, you simply must pick at it. You scratch the skin around it, technically not disturbing the area but soon you find yourself shoving a nail beneath the crusted edge and pulling, lifting the healed parts away and all you are left with is a festering hole that will never fully close, not while you keep poking at it.
This is my wound. My sorely abused scab that I never let close, not entirely. I can go days without touching it, leaving it to begin the healing process until…late at night, I’m alone. I am left with my thoughts and I have to, no I need to, shove my nail back into it and reopen it to let the plasma of my fears leak out.
I was ten years old when I first saw my father feed our house. I stumbled from my room, eyes bleary from sleep. I didn’t want to let too much light into them. My alarm for school was in 4 hours and I didn’t want to mess up my chances to fall back asleep once I had taken care of my bladder that had jerked me from my dreams.
My father was hunched over the drain in the bathroom and upon hearing my footsteps, he jumped and barked at me, asking what I needed. My child brain hadn’t quite caught up with what I saw when I entered the small dimly lit room and I murmured something about peeing. He sighed and told me to go use his and mother’s but to not dare wake her. We both knew his bark was worse than his bite, but my mom…You didn’t wanna wake that woman up for anything less than the house being on fire or a knife somewhere in your body. She ran our home with military precision, everything on time and correct. She loved with more love than I have known since or will ever know, I suspect, but she was a tough cookie.
I walked into his shared bedroom where my mother sleeps, her eye mask firmly over her eyes, blocking out any light. I tiptoed in and all I could hear were her light snores. I relieved myself and went back to bed. It wasn’t until I was on the precipice of sleep that I realized what I saw when I entered the bathroom.
My father, dripping blood from a gash on his arm. He wasn’t cleaning it. He wasn’t rinsing it off or taking care of it, anything that would make sense. He was just holding it above the drain, watching the ruby red liquid drip and gather into the sink below.
Alarm filled me as the knowledge that my father was hurt finally registered. I began to get back up and try to help him but I heard the soft click of his bedroom door and knew he was also going back to sleep. I resolved to ask him in the morning and passed back out. By morning, I had forgotten what had transpired and went about my day as usual. It wouldn’t be until the eve of my sixteenth birthday that I would catch him again.
I had finally had my first boy/girl party and while I wasn’t the most popular, I had plenty of girlfriends and a boy or two that I was eager to spend time with outside of school. Two of them, Fred and Jam, had made it over and I was determined to show my friends how mature I was, how much turning sixteen had changed me.
We gathered in my done-up basement, me in my finest party clothes and everyone else also dressed up for the occasion. We opened presents and scarfed down the party food that my mother had spent the better part of the morning preparing and finally, blissfully, my mom led my dad from the room to give us privacy. He eyed the two boys and made a few snarky comments about shotguns and knowing where they live and my mother laughed it off before giving me The Eyeball which ensured we would behave. Well, mostly.
I received my first kiss that day, from Jam. It was short for Jamison and he was one of my closer friends and while we didn’t feel romantically about each other, it was a perfect ending to my day as I said goodbye to my guests, elated that it had gone so well. I rinsed off the little makeup I had been permitted to wear for the day and went to say goodnight to my parents but I couldn’t find them. I searched the top floor, bottom floor and finally had the idea to check the basement, should they be cleaning after all the shenanigans. I carefully made my way down on the carpeted steps that could still manage to betray you, if you got too eager to get down there and nearly wretched when I saw the scene laid out before me.
My father stood in the center of the room. Belt tied around his arm, cutting off his circulation and he was…peeling his skin. He was removing it from his arm as if it were a mere irritant, no expression changed on his face. I saw him drop it into the utilitarian sink next to our washer and dryer and I don’t know why that’s what did it, but I screamed. I turned and ran and I will never forget the look on his face when he glanced up at me upon hearing my shrill shriek.
It was blank. His eyes had no…emotion in them. It was as if nobody was home. My father was not the most expressive man. He grew up in the 60s and 70s and had been raised with the values of strong, stoic men of that time. He did not emote much but I always could at least see the love in his eyes, even when he was scolding you or speaking sternly about a perceived transgression. The eyes will haunt me, almost as much as watching pieces of my father slither towards the hole as though they were small snakes, slinkily trying to find their way home.
Screaming, I threw myself through the basement door and right into my mother. I smacked into her and once I saw it was her, I began crying and hysterically trying to tell her what I had seen. I babbled incoherently, pointing behind me and trying to make her understand what the hell I had just witnessed when she shushed me, shut the door behind me and led me to my room.
“What you saw, Eugenia…was your father taking care of us, as he has always done. This house demands sacrifice, blood and flesh but it keeps us safe,” she brushed my hair back as we sat on my small twin bed, “We have never been hurt, have we? We have never wanted for much, even in our most dire of times. When Daddy got laid off, didn’t the house provide? You never went hungry and while that Christmas was tight and a little bare, wasn’t that the warmest our home has ever been?”
I was still silently crying, wishing any of this made sense. But…she was right. The house provided. It had been our silent protector for so long. When Bobby Mellencamp chased me home when I was 12, yelling taunts and threats after I had told the teacher that I saw him cheating, didn’t he turn pale white and stammer out apologies as though possessed when I reached our front lawn? I always thought he saw my father standing there and came to his senses upon seeing an authority figure but…Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was the house.
“It will be your job, Eugenia, to feed the house eventually.”
At my horrified expression, she was quick to soothe me, her hands running the length of my back.
“Not anytime soon, just…sometime. Daddy and I won’t be around forever, you know? We can’t always help protect you. When we are gone, when we leave this place, we will leave the house to you. You will move in, hopefully with my grandbabies that you have provided me with and your husband or wife or whoever you create your family with and you will give the house what it needs. You must do this, Eugenia. Do you understand me?”
I shake my head frantically and she grabs my chin, “You will do this. You have time, do not overthink this. Do not let your father’s sacrifice be for naught.”
I spent that evening in bed, unable to sleep. I can’t get the image of my father out of my head and my heart is gripped with fear so real, I feel as if I could reach into the sticky recesses of my chest and rip it out, freeing myself of the burden.
My father pokes his head into my room on his way to bed and says, “You know I love you, right, Ginny?”
I nod and whisper that I love him too. He pauses and quietly continues, “Everything I do…I do for you and your mother, you hear me?”
I nod again and he nods back at me, satisfied with this conversation. I am not. All I’m left with is the fear.
The years continue on and his sacrifice still goes on, even when he turns 60 and I am 30. I have given them grandchildren and a son in law they love almost as much as they love me. He finally begins to show signs of the flesh and blood lost over the years. 10 years later, I sit beside his bed and he tells me for the last time that everything he did was for me and my children, young preteens now next to me, tears in their eyes as their PopPop says goodbye before coughing out his last breath. My mother has been gone for a year, passing peacefully in her sleep. The house knew she was ready to go and now my father is free to join her, wherever she may be.
We had moved into the home when my father began to show signs of his sacrifice but now for the first time, my family is alone in it and there is no one else here to give the house what it needs.
I try to ignore the call of the house but I know I can’t ignore it much longer. Our family has always been healthy and cared for and I don’t want to be the one to end it. I don’t want my father’s sacrifice to be for nothing.
This is my wound. The scab I pick at all hours of the day, whether I am listening to the squabbles of my children or the silent sound of them sleeping in their respective rooms. My husband’s soft snores beside me are so reminiscent of a woman tougher than iron and more loving than anything else.
I have to give the house it’s due. I have to do it and if I weren’t so afraid of my family falling ill or meeting an early end, the paralyzing fear of what I have to do would cripple me. It would make me take my children and my husband and say “Fuck it, this is not my problem.”
But I am afraid of that, more than I have ever been afraid of anything else. More afraid than when I saw my father slicing his skin off like a butcher at a shop, readying the meats for the busy day ahead. The image still haunts me and fills me with a terror so acute, I wonder how I haven’t died yet but…I love my family. I have to do this to protect them. I cannot put it off any longer.
The house is hungry.