Fallible
by Richard Thomas
(Let your ears burn to Cure for Pain by Morphine)

I retch into the stained porcelain until my stomach is a twisted knot. Empty now, there is nothing but gasping air, a sheen of sweat coating my forehead.

I used to lie awake at night and fantasize about such things. Romanticize these horrible moments and how I would react. War, rape, fistfights. Violence layered upon violence, a momentary release of every thread of anger that had knitted its way through my being.

It doesn’t work that way. In the end I was less than a man.

Their screams are what I hear, every night, and a drift of smoke is all it takes to set me off. I’ve told my neighbors to stop. That it’s against the law now. They laugh, and scratch at the track marks on their arms. It ain’t the Four Seasons, they cackle.

I don’t know what would be easier, or more rewarding, I wonder, as I hold the cold metal in my hand, and spin the chamber around. Wrapping my mouth around the barrel and pulling, or making that trek next door to take them out first. It spins, ratcheting around and around. I’ve pulled it twice tonight. The hollow click a tiny echo in my empty hovel at the end of my rope.

I had a job once. It mattered. Once.

Cigarette smoke drifts under my door, and as I shut my eyes, tears squeeze out, and I mutter the endless mantra that I repeat five hundred times a day.

“Forgive me Lord. Please, forgive me.”

I can’t sleep any more. And no matter how many cases of beer I put down, how many times I run a razor over my wrists, I am still numb to the core, and yet am in so much pain that every pore of my body screams out for reprise. I am autistic with loss.

It was my cigarette. I fell asleep. It was the heat at first, but the smoke that really woke me. Choking and gagging, I rolled off of the couch into the darkness. The crackling was deafening, except for their screams. Those I could hear. Flashes of red and orange, hypnotic in its intrusion. The front door fell in under heavy boots, and beacons of failing light. My eyes stung, and I could not see. As I passed out, their voices pierced my eardrums. His, and hers.

“Daddy...daddy. HELP. Daddy.”