Lester

Clint climbs out his bedroom window and walks to town. It isn’t far. It’s probably an easy walk. He goes to the police station and shows them the welts, explains what happened, but the police take him home anyway.

At night Clint does his homework and Lester checks it. It’s wrong again and again and sometimes Lester laughs. The laugh is a mean laugh. Lester laughs without smiling and he stares with his eyes open wide as possible.

The way Clint looks at things changes. The way he stares at the wall or the ground or the television. He is staring the way Lester stares when he’s laughing.

Objects turn black. First, it’s small things like pens and loose change. They fade darker and darker until they are 3D shadows of themselves. Then the television screen blacks out. It doesn’t blow, doesn’t turn gray as though it were off. It blacks out. A wall turns onyx. One day the wall is pale green and the next morning it is black. Haze fills the air and sometimes no one can see around them.

Lester notices a blackening around his nails. He thinks it is a vitamin deficiency. He takes a multi-vitamin and drinks orange juice. Long black lines run down his neck, around his torso and trickle down his legs, like spindly roots. The blackening shades his groin. It occurs to him to blame Clint and he does. Lester sends him into the yard to pick his own beating instrument. Clint knows not to pick the little ones or the flimsy ones. He comes back with lead pipes, thorny bushes and an old set of bicycle handlebars.

The blackening doesn’t cease with the beatings. Of course it doesn’t cease. Of course. Instead the shapes blacken Lester’s skin. Shapes of pipes and sticks and other sharp objects. When Lester grabs Clint by the throat and chokes him, the image is branded into Lester’s flesh. Branded on his forearms, his cheeks and his stomach. There’s no hiding it when Clint loses consciousness, when he no longer gasps for air, when his body lies still.

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Brandi Wells has fiction in McSweeney’s, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, Smokelong Quarterly and Hobart. She has a chapbook forthcoming as part the chapbook collective Fox Force 5, which is being released by Paper Hero Press. She blogs at http://brandiwells.blogspot.com/