Chuck’s Family
by Simon Wilsey
June 10, 2009
Chuck’s family didn’t like him very much, so they decided one day, when Chuck was eight years old, to leave and never come back. They left in the afternoon, while Chuck was still at school, being held in the principal’s office for dry humping the chalkboard during math class. “Why did you do it, Chuck?” the principal asked.
“I don’t know,” Chuck answered.
“Your teacher asked you to stop.”
“I know.”
“The janitor asked you to stop.”
“I know.”
“Your fellow students were asking you to stop.”
“I know.”
“They were yelling at you.”
“I know.” Chuck wiped his nose with his sleeve, not because he’d been crying, but instead because he was allergic to most things, which left him generally nasal and puffed up.
“So why did you do it, Chuck?”
“I don’t know . . . They were yelling at me.”
“I’ve also heard about that game you were playing with Phillip . . . Batman.” Batman was a game in which Phillip and Chuck ran around the room with various blunt objects, shouting, “Batman!” as they struck random students over the head. The game came to an abrupt end when Chuck decided that Phillip was a traitor and hit Phillip with a chair, effectively knocking him out and sending him to the hospital. “That’s not a nice game,” the principal said.
“Oh.”
“You also wrote some unpleasant comments on your teacher’s birthday card.” One of the other second-grade teachers thought it would be nice if all the students signed a giant piece of white cardboard to celebrate the teacher’s birthday, and the students were surprisingly polite about it, each scrawling their own goofy comment. When it came time for Chuck to write something, he had a hard time of it, but when he did, it all came out in an eerily precise handwriting for an eight-year-old: “What do you do in hell?” Below the remark, he cheerily signed his name, as if there couldn’t be any objection to what he had just written. “Why did you do it?”
“I thought it was funny.”
“It wasn’t funny, Chuck. Do you know what hell is?”
“I said I was sorry.” Chuck would’ve gotten in more trouble for what he had written, but the incomprehensibility of what he had done saved him from anything more severe than a few concerned speeches.
“And all of this over the course of one week. I’m worried about you, Chuck,” the principal said. “You’re a good kid. I know you are. But I want you to promise me to behave a little better.”
“Okay.”
“Think about what your friends are thinking, and the other students, and your teacher.”
“Okay.” The principal stared at him. “I will.”
“Good. I’m glad. Now, you just wait here for someone to pick you up.” Nobody came. Chuck sat in a chair inside the principal’s office for an hour and a half, slouched over, staring into nothing with the self-awareness of a cow. The boy’s hair, although matted close to his head, was slightly overgrown around his ears and the back of his neck. He gave off an unwashed smell. The smell made you think of a boy who told his parents he was taking a bath when all he really did was sit in the bath for two minutes, spending the rest of his time making faces in the mirror and splashing the water now and then for effect. But it really could be anything. He could put up vicious fights every night until his parents, desperate for a drink, let him go back to his filthy room in peace. He could turn the shower on only to sneak out the window to play in the neighbor’s garbage. One of the house’s underground sewage pipes could be leaking, lending the house and everyone in it the distinct smell of festering shit. Or maybe Chuck was a hobo boy, wandering from park to park, coming to school for the meals, washing himself in public fountains only when he had to.
He certainly seemed like a hobo, with the way he managed to look totally unconcerned that no one was coming for him. The principal was sure he had called the boy’s home to let the parents know where their son was, but he looked the number up again and called again to be sure. Like before, he had to leave a message on their voice mail, and the voice before the beep reassured him again that he was in fact calling Chuck’s family. Still, nobody showed, and nobody called back to verify the principal’s message. The principal, looking in Chuck’s direction, almost began to pity the little thing.
It sniffled, and the principal thought to himself that if he were eight and in such a situation he would sniffle too, but then the nature of Chuck’s allergies became clearer. Chuck didn’t just sniffle, but made a belabored effort to breathe through his congested nose, resulting in a variety of whistles, gurgles, and wheezes. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and as you looked closer at the sleeve, you realized that he’d been doing this all day and that his sleeves had turned dark and slimy from the effort. The bottom of his nose, too, had turned red and raw from all the wiping, and the more it seemed to hurt, the more Chuck seemed to rub it with spite and fury. He would rub his nose vigorously enough to shift his weight back and forth in the chair, then he would try to breathe through his nose, and when he inevitably failed, he opened his mouth and gasped for air, a swamp of spit and snot crawling down the lower half of his face, sometimes into the corners of his widening grimace. To clean up this mess, Chuck invariably used his sleeve again, but by then it was so moist that it only made his face uniformly damp and sticky. And then he would begin frantically rubbing his nose again, perhaps with the thought that the faster he rubbed his nose, the easier it would be to ignore the pain of rubbing his raw skin. The principal, not wanting to watch this for much longer, turned his attention to the preparation of official school documents.
Chuck got a hungry look in his eye, not because he was hungry, but because he had run out of things to do, and eating was an easy thing to do. Not having anything to chew on at the moment but his sleeve, and having grown bored with his sleeve, Chuck took the next easy thing to do and began playing with himself as he sat on the chair inside the principal’s office, first by scratching the outskirts of his crotch, then by sliding his hand into his pants and massaging absentmindedly. The principal, busy with his paperwork, didn’t look up until Chuck’s whistling nose and gasps for air became so violent that the principal thought that the boy must be having an asthma attack. And then he looked up. “Chuck?”
“What?” Chuck asked. His hand was still in his pants, but the massaging slowed down somewhat.
“Will you stop that?”
“What?”
“Stop that.”
“. . . Oh.” Chuck pulled out his sweaty hand, smelled it, then wiped the sweat on his pants.
The principal’s pity slowly and inexorably turned into disgust. He thought that perhaps the boy’s family lived close enough so that Chuck usually walked home and didn’t need to be picked up. Without much more of an explanation than, “I believe you can go home now,” the principal hustled Chuck out the door and left him there.
“What about my parents?” Chuck asked.
The principal answered, “They’re waiting for you.” They weren’t.
Scratching himself for a little awhile, Chuck thought about how he might get home. He didn’t know it, but he had a remarkable memory. As he paced back and forth along the schoolyard, kicking at the asphalt to see if he could knock up a chunk big enough to throw at a car, Chuck saw in his mind the route taken by his father whenever he picked the boy up in his SUV. All he remembered was a certain number of blocks and turning left or right and the tops of apartment buildings, but it was good enough to allow Chuck, bored and slightly hungry, to start wandering in the direction he thought he should be heading in. His memory made more sense from a backseat’s point-of-view, so he walked down the middle of the street, peering on tiptoe to try to get the right perspective. Once he lost what little concentration he had, chasing a squirrel to see if he could stomp on it or kick it, but it ran up a tree and Chuck went back to the street.
Every now and then, Chuck would hold up traffic, not being fast enough to keep up with cars. He stuck to the side streets, so he only held up one or two at a time, but the drivers were thoroughly amazed at having to stop for what, by all accounts, looked like a street urchin. Eventually the cars just drove around him. None of them had the heart to beep, and all of them were too afraid to stop, for fear of being accused of kidnapping by a child whose mental faculties were clearly in question. One car, after pulling alongside, rolled a window down so a passenger could stare at Chuck in indecision. Chuck responded by kicking the car’s passenger-side door and yelling, “Why don’t you drive me home!” The car drove away as if Chuck was a rabid dog. His mouth seemed to foam, but that was just the mucus and spittle that Chuck hadn’t wiped off yet. Chuck kept walking.
As he began to recognize more houses, he stopped, looked in the distance, and spotted a police car. He reacted, instinctively, with fear. The person in the car must have called the police, and now they were going to take him somewhere he didn’t want to be. He ran into an alley. Somewhere in the excitement of the chase, such as it was, a sudden distraction overtook him, so that Chuck began staring at the garbage cans, hoping that maybe he’d find a rat. He’d never seen one up close, and he thought about what he could do if he caught one. Maybe the rat would bite him, if he were lucky. Then he could show off the marks to strangers, and then, if the bite mark bled, he could watch the blood seep out him like water from a sponge. Then he would look cool.
The police car passed the alley lazily. Chuck regained his focus. He was being chased. “If only I had that rat,” he thought, “then I’d show those cops.” He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that a rat could be a weapon, if only it were used properly. He wiped his nose as he stepped back out of the alley, poking around the corner to see who was there. No one, and at the end of the block, he saw the apartment where his family lived. Where he lived.
It was a clean apartment, two stories and a basement, in a neighborhood of similar families. Every decade or so, one community pushed another out: the Polish pushed out the Germans, Puerto Ricans kicked out the Polish, yuppies kicked out the Puerto Ricans, and at the moment, age was doing its number on the yuppies. Mostly what you saw were families, tiresome unmarried couples, single people with dogs, and the occasional oldtimer or eccentric. If not God-fearing, the people there at least had a developed sense of shame. They clung to each other, watched each other, and talked about each other. They kept the neighborhood clean. Chuck hated them all.
It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that Chuck hated. He didn’t know enough about it to really be able to say he hated anything. Even though he knew the word and how to use it, it had no real meaning. He had once spent an entire day telling his students, teachers, and parents that he hated their fingers, he hated their toes, he hated their eyes, and hated the spot between their legs. But he didn’t really know what he’d said and neither did anyone else. “I hate your toes!” he told his fellow students, but no one paid enough attention until he made concerted effort to jump on all their feet and break bones. In the same way, his teachers didn’t know what to think when he told them that he hated all the spots between their legs, but all the same, their hips twitched backwards and away before the teachers realized how they would react. If Chuck ever realized that he actually hated like he said he did, he would’ve been overcome, as if by prophetic revelation.
Approaching his front door, Chuck stretched his legs and arms so he could ring the doorbell. The buzz from within the house could be heard as a faint vibration, but nothing happened to the door, not even after Chuck spent five minutes pacing as loudly as he could, stamping his feet on the pavement and grunting. He rang the doorbell again. It buzzed. The wind blew through the trees. That was it.
Something inside Chuck panicked like a child would panic. A single thing had gone wrong and now the world was over. They were gone. It was more likely, he told himself, that the family was off at a doctor’s appointment, getting laundry, doing shopping, anything but not be at the door. Being reasonable wasn’t helping. His six-year-old sister Ann went to the same school. She should be home. Someone should have picked her up. Where was she, and where was the person who had picked her up?
Indignantly, Chuck walked over to one of his family’s first floor windows and tried to pound on it furiously. He wasn’t tall enough and could only reach the window with the tips of his fingers. A few doors down, a family kept a rock garden, so Chuck spent fifteen minutes sneaking into their yard, lifting their largest rock with a supernatural effort, and lugging it back beneath the window so he could stand on it. He pounded again, hoping that at least he would scare the person inside who was ignoring him, but it didn’t work. He was too tired to pound well, and the people inside weren’t moving. So he got another rock, a smaller one, then he went back to the window and he beat it with the rock. It took longer than he thought it would, but the window finally broke. Chuck shook his arms, getting ready to climb. He knew it would be tough, and the shards of leftover glass would probably cut him up. But it would be worth it as he walked through his home with outstretched arms, bleeding for all to see. “Look what you did!” he’d yell at one of his younger siblings. Then he’d find his parents. “Look at what you did to me!”
A neighbor watched from a house across the street. She first noticed Chuck when he was carrying the first rock to the window. The neighbor realized that she was the sole person in the community who would have to decide what to do. “Damn it,” she said to no one in particular, “why does it have to be my turn?” Chuck had once managed to tear off her doorknob. She was too afraid to ask how or why he had done it. He had also spent a night in her backyard, curled up, asleep, his thumb in his mouth. She would’ve called his parents, but somehow, again she was afraid. The same thing was happening here. The unimaginable consequences of interfering kept her from doing a thing.
As she closed the blinds, Chuck clambered into his home. He landed on the floor with an empty thump. Just like he’d wanted, he was bleeding, but not very much and he didn’t see anyone he could show it to. Everything in the apartment was where it should be, but not quite. The furniture was in the right place, but all the shelves were emptier, as if certain items had been selectively taken away. “Hey!” he yelled, waiting for a reaction. “I’m bleeding!” He held up as proof his left arm, which to his dismay was barely bleeding at all. “Can you get me some juice!” Nothing. The only sound was his own heavy wheezing. “Hello!”
The quiet was proof enough that the house was empty, which confused Chuck a great deal. Usually his mother was home with his younger siblings, the ones who weren’t old enough to go to school yet. His father came home later, but sometimes he was home early enough to drive Chuck home from school, always making sure that Chuck’s seatbelt was tightly fastened. “Y’all set?” his father asked cheerily and falsely. Chuck never answered, which was assumed to be a yes. He heard nothing now and could only respond to nothing.
“Cmon!” Chuck yelled. “Where are you!”
Nobody answered. First he was pissed because nobody answered him. Then he was happy because nobody was home. Then he realized he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if nobody else was here. He looked at the broken glass and thought about the time that he tried to throw his infant brother out the window. It’s not like he wanted to hurt the little guy. The idea of hurting a newborn wasn’t even part of his calculations. All Chuck wanted to see was a tiny body floating through the frame and then disappearing as it fell to the other side. Chuck believed that it would’ve been a beautiful image, but he hadn’t realized that the window wasn’t open. When he took the body and threw it (with a certain grace, he thought), his little brother bounced off the window and fell to the floor. Chuck stared at it a little while as it cried, disappointed that things hadn’t gone like he wanted them to. His mother heard the screaming and ran over. “What did you do!” she yelled. “Nothing! I didn’t anything! He tried to jump!” “What?” “He tried to jump!” Chuck was already running to his room when his mother told him to go to his room. So he went to the kitchen instead and kicked things.
It was all silence now. Chuck decided to wait as long as he could for someone to come home. In the meantime he went to the kitchen and found a box of Cheerios. He poured them out onto a table and picked out the ones he liked, the ones that were shaped correctly, and he ate them. Leaving the rest behind, he wandered around the house and dug through people’s drawers. This was getting boring. So he took the drawers out of all the dressers, emptied the ones that weren’t already empty, and stacked them on top of each other. He made a wobbly staircase leading up to a random blank spot on the living room wall. The idea was that he would walk up and down the staircase until he got tired of it, but on the first try the whole thing collapsed, not really hurting him but knocking the wind out of him when he landed on his back. He thought about crying, but nobody was around, so he didn’t bother.
With nothing to do and no one to yell at, Chuck settled down. He took the empty Cheerios box and gnawed on it for an hour or so as he sat in a corner. Then he stretched out on his parents’ bed, and then he threw around their blankets and pillows. He went around their home, to their phone. Maybe he could make phone calls by pushing random buttons. He picked up the whole phone just to see what it felt like to carry both the phone and its stand, and beneath the phone was a fresh-looking business card, as if the card had slipped under there by mistake. All he really knew at first was that the word hotel was printed on it somewhere, and he knew that people went to hotels to get away from things. It had something that looked like a phone number and something that looked like an address. Chuck was inherently suspicious and paid attention.
Once his parents had tried to put Chuck, their second eldest son, into an asylum. It wasn’t called an asylum but a residential treatment center. Every fifteen years it changed its name to avoid the shame of itself. All Chuck remembered from the experience was a series of needles and confusing conversations. In the end, the asylum wouldn’t take him. It explained, in rather complicated terms, that Chuck was neither retarded nor disabled. He was simply a pain in the ass, and the policy of the asylum (and most asylums, they were told) was to only accept cases that were clearly of a clinical nature. So they took Chuck to a psychiatrist, in the hopes that, if the talking didn’t work, at least the good doctor would prescribe him something. After two appointments, Chuck was given the strongest medication available for a child of his size. All the pills managed to do was give Chuck focus to do the things that Chuck wanted to. Nobody wanted that. Within the first day, Chuck attempted four times, with increasingly elaborate methods, to kill a neighbor’s dog. The prescription was canceled, and the good doctor was never seen again.
Chuck held onto the card and walked around the house. He went to the kitchen, put the card down on a table, opened up the refrigerator, and spilled a number of bottles and various items onto the floor, looking for something that wasn’t there. The fridge was slightly emptier than usual, but not by much. Chuck felt bad about it, not knowing why, but he went to the card again.
Outside, the sun was setting. In all the windows, the light either went away or turned red. Chuck felt left behind. As he looked at the card, he told himself that his parents weren’t coming back. They’d left him like his mother and father had threatened on at least four occasions. If they’d simply had to leave the house, someone else would have been here in their stead, someone paid or related, to keep him from wrecking the place. This time, it was for keeps. Maybe they hadn’t even planned on doing it. Maybe, when everyone was together after school, knowing that Chuck was being held back, they decided to just pack up a few things and leave. Looking at the card, Chuck reasoned that they could even be staying at a hotel for a little while before setting off for futures unknown. Leaving Chuck behind with broken windows and fallen staircases.
It wasn’t fair. Chuck was mad. What they did was neither right nor just. Chuck was hungry, yet they would not feed him. Their decision to leave him was inherently wrong, not because Chuck believed that abandoning children was wrong on principle, but because what they had done had hurt Chuck personally. Any act which hurt Chuck was, as far as Chuck was concerned, a universal evil. He tore up the apartment in retaliation. Every mirror was broken. Every window was at least cracked. What few books lay around the house were torn up and thrown on the ground. The television was knocked off its stand. Small, family pictures were torn out of frames, chewed up, and spit out. Larger pictures were repeatedly stepped on. He urinated on a recliner and attempted to shit on the sofa, but all he could get out was an airy fart. He ripped apart the family’s printer and computer speakers as best he could, but his father’s laptop was missing, a further sign that the family had left. He ate his mother’s makeup and emptied all the flowerpots with the dirt into the bathtub and dishwasher. He wanted to teach them a lesson for leaving, but the fact that they would have to come back to learn it made Chuck all the more furious.
By now it was dark. He grabbed his coat from under a pile of soiled laundry before heading off into the colder night. The card was in his pocket. Turning to the first major street, he stepped into traffic, seeing if he could get one of the cars to stop. They swerved around him mostly, beeping at the small child as they tried to avoid the accident. Some didn’t have the room to swerve, surrounded on either side by other cars, so they stopped frantically, as if trapped in front of this child risking death like a demon in the night. Chuck then ran to the side of that car, thinking he’d open the door, but with this sudden avenue of escape, the car took off into the darkness, leaving Chuck to pace on the painted lines in-between the streaming, frantic traffic.
Chuck spotted a car double parked on the side of the road, with an unshaven man at the wheel and on the phone. Sensing an opportunity, Chuck ran across the rest of the street, nearly causing two crashes in the process. Finding the door unlocked, he leapt into the passenger’s seat as the unshaven man talked obliviously on the phone.
“I don’t give a shit about your excuses! Why aren’t you fucking here? Motherfucker! Fuck you! Fuck you! I got the money, you got the money, you said you’d be here, so why aren’t you fucking here?” Chuck listened to the way he talked, never having heard someone talk in quite that way for quite so often. The man turned, realized an eight-year-old had gotten into his car, and asked the little boy, “Who the fuck are you?” He went back to the phone. “No, I wasn’t talking to you. A kid just got in my car. A little kid. How the fuck should I know? Just let me get off the phone, okay? But I want my shit, you understand? We had an agreement, you piece of crap. I want my shit . . . Bye.” Turning back to Chuck, he said again, “Who the fuck are you?”
After pausing to think about what to say, Chuck held up the business card and said, “Take me here.”
The man didn’t bother to look at the card. “Go home. You ain’t mine.”
“But you have to take me here.”
“Get out of my car.”
Chuck thought of ways to get the man to do what he wanted, like kicking in the radio, but as he was thinking, a cop car showed up at the nearest intersection. “You have to get me out of here! You have to get me out of here!”
“Get out of the car, kid!”
The man looked around and saw the cop car. “They’re coming for me!” Chuck yelled. He was double parked. They could probably get him on obstructing traffic if they wanted. And his plates were expired. “They’re coming for me!” They was a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam in his backseat.
“All right, kid, I’ll get you out of here. The car pulled away, past the police and down a few blocks, until it turned down a side street and stopped.
“Take me here,” Chuck said, again gesturing with the card.
“Why should I?”
“You have to.”
“This place is all the way out by the fucking airport.”
“And you have to fucking take me there!”
“What did you say, kid?”
“You have to take me there! Take me there! Shit! Fuck! Take me there!” Chuck started banging his head against the dashboard, as if to threaten the driver by hurting himself. “Take me there!” And what would the driver do with a passed-out kid in his front? He couldn’t dump the kid at a hospital. There would be too many questions, and no one would believe his answers. Even if he just drove away, the little bastard would probably memorize his plates to get him in trouble. And then there were the cameras.
“Christ piece of shit,” the driver said. “Settle down kid. I’ll take you where you gotta go.”
Chuck didn’t seem to hear and continued to bang his head against the dash while yelling, “Take me there! Take me there!”
“Stop it, you little asshole! I said I’ll take you there! You’re getting snot all over my car!” Chuck stopped banging his head, swaying his head back and forth in something of a daze. “Don’t you have family or something who can do this for you?”
“That’s where my family is.”
“And they didn’t take you with?”
“No.”
“Did you try calling them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They won’t answer.”
“Crazy fucking family . . . Are they trying to get rid of you or something?”
“I think so.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“And you don’t want them to leave.”
“I won’t let them.” Somewhere behind the nasal, high-pitched voice was a cold calculation that frightened the driver a little more than he would ever admit.
“They’re gonna regret pissing you off, aren’t they?” he said. “I regret even meeting you. Put on your seatbelt. We don’t need more cops.”
The car pulled back onto the main road and headed for the expressway. Chuck was dead silent except for the wheezes sputtering out of his nose. He was a ball of concentrated rage, his body contorted into a half-curled position which made it look like he was taking a bad shit or at least desperately trying. The more Chuck thought about being abandoned, the more he wanted to devour something alive. His silence, as a result, was loud.
The driver’s cell phone rang while the car was still on the highway, speeding at close to thirty miles per hour over the limit. There were still cars passing him up, so he didn’t worry about being pulled over. It was a little tricky, though, to drive like he was doing with everything going on around him. “What is it . . . I’m doing something right now. None of your damn business. So now you decided to show up. Yknow I couldn’t wait all day for you. I got things. None of your fucking business . . .” The conversation continued like this for some time, as Chuck got bored of the monotony of billboards and skyline. He snapped out of it when the car pulled onto an exit ramp. “All right,” the driver said, “where is this fucking place?” The car meandered in circles until the driver got a good sense of how the streets and addresses were set up out here, then he found the place, a twenty story building with a large parking lot and some annexes for what probably were swimming pools and the like. They pulled up to the front door. “You can get out here.”
Chuck, without thanking him or asking for further help, left the car and walked away. “You’re welcome, you little shit!” the driver said, pulling away and hoping to God that he didn’t have any kids he didn’t know about. “Why do I waste my time . . .”
At the front desk, Chuck asked where the Wolseys were. “They’re my family,” he explained. The receptionist, not seeing the harm, looked up the hotel records and found a family of Wolseys in room 704. She led Chuck to the elevator, told him to hit the number seven, and explained that the room was very close to the elevators. As she walked back to the front counter, she thought to herself that she probably should’ve called the room first, but it had been a busy day and she didn’t really see the harm.
His family, the Wolseys, were in fact waiting in room 704. Chuck was right. They wished they had thought out more of a plan. If they had bought plane tickets in advance and had everything ready to go, they could’ve snuck out in the middle of the night and been halfway to Denver in three hours. This petty little escape was just a whim. The two parents and four children sensed at once that Chuck would be late and that this afforded them a grand opportunity. They couldn’t get a plane they wanted until the next day, but they’d camp out in a hotel and take off later. It couldn’t go wrong. God wouldn’t allow it. The room had two queen-sized beds and a cot, a bed for the parents and everything else for the children. Everything felt rather rushed. Over the past hour, everyone began shuddering as if, in the rush of packing, someone had forgotten something important. It was dark outside. Everyone wanted to get to sleep but couldn’t.
When a knock came at their door, the eldest daughter, three years older than Chuck, instinctively went to get it, out of a sense of daughterly duty and habit. She was a joy unto her parents, as good a reason as any for a mother to quit her job and keep on having children.
The daughter opened the door and everyone saw the tense eight-year-old standing on the threshold. They all responded with a terrified resignation. It would never be over. His nostrils wheezed in the doorway. He was theirs, and no matter how far away they tried to go, their son would always be trailing behind them, pushing their faces into the dirt, terrorizing anyone who came near him, reminding everyone that it was the Wolseys’ fault that Chuck Wolsey came into the world. If the other children set about curing the world’s problems, it would never make up for the hate that was now etched into Chuck’s young face.
Chuck, for his part, was filled with rage at the final proof of what his family had done. He wanted to implode the hotel with a single, vengeful scream. He wanted to pelt all of them with rats. He wanted to show them once and for all that he was not to be left behind. He wanted to hurt them physically.
Instead he cried. His mother and father stood nervously on the other side of the room. He cried and ran to them. At first, not knowing if he was embracing his mother or father, he soon realized it was his father as he rubbed the spit, tears, and mucus into the man’s crotch. He hugged him as if to hurt them, and then he screamed at all of them.
“Don’t you ever do that again, you motherfuckers! I’m not a piece of shit! You can’t leave me! You can’t! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
The family, with a mutual shrug, accepted the lost son back into their embrace.
Maybe it would work out better next time.