Family traditions.
Some families watch Home Alone around Christmas. Others coordinate outfits for Halloween.
The men in my family commit suicide just before their 34th birthday.
I discovered my father’s body when I was just 9 years old.
School had let out early, and instead of being treated to an afternoon of cartoons, I got viscera. A handgun to the head. A note that simply read “No.” A skull that simply wasn’t there anymore.
A birthday cake, “Happy 34th Papa Bear” etched in bright red icing, covered in grey brain matter.
We hadn’t seen him in a week.
My sister Daisy found my oldest brother Conrad’s body swinging from a tree in the backyard.
She never really recovered. She chased the dragon to forget, and just before she’d nod off, she would mumble about the swaying and creaking of the tree being a song of warning. She’d found a note tucked in his shoe that simply read “No.”
Decorations adorned the backyard, green and purple lettering glittering excitedly in the Sun, “Happy 34th!”, wishing his corpse well.
No one had seen him in a week.
Happy college graduation to me.
Elvin, three years my senior, took off after that. None of us ever saw or heard from him again. We all agreed, in tacit silence, he had taken his own life and just saw fit to spare us the inevitable pain of finding the body.
My mother never spoke about any of it. If you pressed her hard enough, she’d mumble about a sickness running through my dad’s family. We all knew our grandfather had committed suicide before we were born and that dad was an only child.
When you asked her, she never sounded angry, maybe a bit sorrowful, but not bereaved. It was always vexing but I never made any headway. With each passing day she retreated further and further within herself, reticent to talk or do much of anything.
Life moves on, whether you want it to or not.
Daisy disappeared into Alice’s terrible rabbit hole and the last any of us heard of her, she was still somewhere, scraping the bottom of it and dancing with the golden brown.
My mom left and moved to Florida because that seems to be the perfunctory thing to do when you give up but have a decent bank account.
I coped. I honestly couldn’t tell you how. Coldness? Indifference? A wall built up inside, maybe.
I moved across the country and threw myself into law school, eventually becoming a trial attorney. The work was serendipitous, really. It was a sickness of its own that consumed everything. It suited my perfectly. There was not time to think, feel, or decay. No room to make a family or build a life; there was just non-stop, dramatic bombardment. Time moved impossibly fast and my mind was too crowded for thoughts of the past.
That was fine with me.
You’d think I’d be wracked with anticipation and anxiety as my 34th birthday loomed.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t think about my family and when I did, I only caustically surmised they all made choices. They had choices, they made them, the end.
No one forced my grandfather, father, or brother take their own lives. My sister stuck those needles into her veins of her own accord. Elvin made his choice to just run for the hills. And my mom’s foray into self-imposed solitude and exile was of her own making.
I had no compassion for them.
To me, each of their choices just compounded the sorrow of those left behind who in turn made even more horrible and selfish choices. The coldness grew inside me like a virus, and I didn’t care.
I never told anyone in my new life about my family. Not that there was really anyone in my life. Just visitors kept at arms’ length, distractions to pass the time, marks on the lifer prisoner’s wall. If anyone asked about my family, I just said vaguely said we never got along and weren’t in contact.
I honestly didn’t even realize my 34th was a week away. I’d made junior partner two years ago and I had Machiavellian designs on having my name on the firm’s letterhead. It wasn’t until Janice, our firm’s ancient legal secretary who seemed to predate the law itself, asked me what kind of cake I wanted.
You’d think it would have sunk in then, but I shrugged it off. I had one chemical company to sue and another to defend. I didn’t have *time* for mental illness.
Seven days before my birthday, I woke up in a daze, naked from the waist down, my white undershirt stained bright red, having devoured two pounds of raw beef.
It was unsettling but I was more concerned with spending the remainder of the night and maybe the next few days sick. I had trial prep, conferences, motions to edit, law clerks to scream at.
I never got sick.
Six days before my birthday, I came to, stark naked in a field.
The skeleton of a goat, still wet here and there with the remnants of innards, lay beside me. I could still taste it. I’d even chewed off some of its horns.
Five days before my birthday, I saw it for the first time. The creature. The thing that shouldn’t be but was.
It was scaling the exterior wall of our firm’s building. I was completely convinced I was hallucinating, a side effect from sleep deficiency and my ludicrous new involuntary diet.
It couldn’t be real.
The…thing…. was six feet long, at least, but didn’t look like it was supposed to be. Its body appeared as if machines had taken a human and unwillingly stretched it. The torso was simply too long compared to the rest of the body.
Its flesh was a nauseating combination of splotched tan and red, what I imagined a human might look like if you just ever so carefully shaved off the top layer of skin. What little flesh I could make out.
There was nothing but a skull in place of a head, but the eyeholes were empty and distended to form enormous vertical slits. At the end of its legs, nothing but bones protruded, shaped into horrifyingly extended claws.
Somehow, none of that was nearly as disturbing as what stuck out of it.
Every sharp implement conceivable protruded from its body. A dozen scissors protruded here and there. Hedge clippers swayed to and fro on the back of its neck. What looked like a broken spear jutted out of its left side. Innumerable knives covered half of its torso. A dozen more weapons I couldn’t even really make out were stabbed so deeply into the thing, they were a part of it.
As it moved, they moved.
The thing was scaling the outside of sheer rock wall and glass windows with ease, powering along absurd grace and unfathomable speed.
I don’t know how bone could cling to glass or rock, but it did.
The monstrosity kept tilting its head up, seeming to sniff with a nose that wasn’t there, climbing higher and higher before coming to a dead stop outside a window.
I could only sit, dumbfounded, staring at something that defied every ounce of the logic that saved me from the perils of the past.
But I was certain it was outside my office window.
With a snap, its head turned, and it saw me with eyes that weren’t. That just, weren’t.
It leapt 34 stories off the side of the building and cleared about half a football field toward me before I could blink, like a deer springing through the morning forest, unperturbed.
A guttural, high pitched screech came out of it as it bounded toward me, sounding precisely like what I imagine a pig dying sounds like, desperate, panicky - a death squeal.
It was moving toward me at a speed no creature on Earth could possibly sustain. The buried weapon swayed with each bound, a mesmerizing and paralyzing dance of death.
Somewhere, in the deep recesses of my lizard brain, autonomic cognition kicked in. Because I certainly don’t remember getting in my car. I don’t remember flying 90 miles an hour down a side street as the monster recklessly pursued me. I don’t remember ending up at an abandoned glue factory, the empty cancer cluster one of my clients was having me defend in a class action suit.
But I do remember coming to, rocking back and forth, hands on my knees, a slightly high-pitched whine coming from deep inside of me.
I do remember eating rat after rat after rat until I was so full, I couldn’t move.
Four days before my birthday, I smashed my cell phone to bits, drank most of a bottle of whisky, and ran.
Ran and ran. Faster than I remember ever running, around the abandoned factory, panicking and shrieking, panicking and shrieking.
The rats were gone. Even the insects had fled.
I just drank and felt an impossibly painful hunger well up inside me.
Three days before my birthday, I couldn’t bear the hunger anymore and left the factor to find fresh meat.
I was halfway through eating a disemboweled cow when it found me.
Its howling pierced my brain and echoed throughout my body, a note so high no human could possibly hear it and keep their feet. It sounded like a collection of every creature begging for its life every day on this fetid planet being thrown at me all at once.
It chased me, its bone claws screeching and sparking against the gravel of the road, but I miraculously outpaced it, losing it in a forest before making my way back the factory.
I didn’t realize until I was back in my new little hellhole nest that I had been “running” on all fours.
Two days before the my birthday, it caught me by surprise.
I was so consumed with, well, consuming, that I never heard it approach. It slammed its body into me, knocking me from my meal. It whined at me, begged, pleaded, threatened, all at once.
I screamed back, nearly matching its pitch.
The thing didn’t attack me, but it had stolen my meal, was blocking my meal, it took my meal, I wanted my meal, it had my meal, give me my fucking meal.
I thrashed and clawed at the beast, feeling my blood boil over with rage. I needed the meat, and it kept defending the lifeless corpses from my snapping jowls.
We clawed and scratched and bit and tore into one another almost in unison, synchronized and frenzied.
Then I stopped. And so did it.
I saw the meal.
It was a farmer and his wife. Clients of mine. Oil money. I’d…I’d forgotten their names.
I’d forgotten my name.
Their faces had been cleanly eaten away. I had eaten the wife’s gut.
The creature didn’t attack me, didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Just watched me with eyes that weren’t. That just weren’t.
I could almost smell pity coming from it.
It began to make an unfamiliar nose. Low, guttural, strained, like it was trying to make a sound it didn’t know.
I bounded off, lightning in the glowing dark, but I swore I heard it utter a strained “no” behind me.
One day before my birthday, it found me.
In my new nest, rotten and rife with bones of every animal imaginable.
I woke up to it circling me, slowly, like a carrion bird.
This time, I didn’t attack.
Everything hurt. My bones didn’t feel right, like they were being pulled by the invisible hands of evolution. My fingers all felt broken, stretched at the skin.
The creature paused and sat on its hind legs. It began its low groan, straining with everything it had.
“N..n….n….o.”
“No WHAT?” I wailed, accusing it, begging it. My words were garbled, half gibberish amidst the shrill screech of my voice, almost unintelligible.
“P….p….ppp.”
It whipped its head about in frustration, trying to summon some human word that didn’t belong to it, wasn’t a part of it.
“P….appy.”
My legs gave out and my knees hit the cold factory floor.
I wailed. The pain in my bones was unbearable.
Pappy.
My family’s nickname for me.
The creature trotted slowly, a thousand weapons all clanging together and jostling, buried throughout its body, swaying.
That’s when it hit me.
What was in the eyes that just weren’t.
“Elvin?” I whispered, the last time I ever heard my voice in a low tone.
“G…g…..gone. S….s….s…aid yes.”
The thing that was once my brother reached its bony hand behind its neck and pulled out the gardening shears.
Eyes that just weren’t watched me intently as it and began stabbing itself over and over again in the neck. No blood, no spinal fluid, no life forced spilled out onto the factory floor. The shears slid in life knife through butter.
I felt sick as I looked into the eyes that just weren’t. My brother was still somewhere in there.
Elvin began pulling each weapon out, one by one, and smashing deep into various parts of its body. Nothing killed it, nothing even made it bleed. Elvin wouldn’t die, couldn’t.
“H……h…..hungry f-forever. St…starvation w…won’t…k-kill. C-c-c-c-c…ursed for..forev..forever.”
Each word seemed to take everything Elvin had, the last bits of humanity draining out of him.
He pulled a long knife from the depths of his left shoulder, trotted over, looking at me, into me, with that haunting visage, eyes that just weren’t.
Elvin gently dropped the blade in my hand, nodding toward my throat.
“S…. s…sa….say
NOOOOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOoOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooOOOOOOOOO.”
The squeal shook the walls of the factory, loose tiles spilling, worn copper pipes plummeting.
“H…h…hurry.”
I looked at my watch.
It’s almost my birthday.
I have a choice to make.