Sticks and Stones

The day is cold and wet and my feet make tiny splashes on the sidewalk as I walk. Every few steps or so I clunk my foot in harder to make the splash higher and see if my father would notice if the bottom of his pant legs got wet. He never does. Sometimes I wonder what it would take to make him notice anything. I notice too much. I notice the way the birds change their tune on sad days, and I notice when the clouds move too fast around us like they're getting impatient for the end of days, and I notice when people are talking and one of them really doesn't want to be talking and is looking past the other person out the window at the sky, and I notice when the other kids are looking at me strangely but I never know why, and I notice when the city pulse is rhythmic and when it is not.

Frantically, I reach into my pocket to make sure that the pebble is still there. I feel my heart relax as I feel its presence, exactly where it always is. Pressed against my right thigh, keeping me grounded, telling me that it was my friend even when no one liked me very much.

"Damn rain," my father grumbles, shaking some droplets off of his umbrella. "Sometimes I wonder why we live in this dreadful city."

He is under the umbrella, and I am walking next to him getting my hair wet so I wonder why he is complaining of the rain when he is dry. But I don't question him. I simply nod in agreement even though I really do love this city and never want to leave. The rain makes me feel peaceful. I feel again for my rock.

"Hello?" my father says and I almost respond and then realize he's talking on the phone, not to me. "No, I'm taking the kid to the dentist. Hey, I told you I'd be there and I'll be there. Deal me in. What? Of course I have money. Business is good, I'll be there alright."

He smashes his phone briskly into his pocket without saying goodbye. I'm afraid to go to the dentist because that is when my father finds out if I've been brushing my teeth or not and if I haven't then the bill is higher and my father's face gets more red than usual and he yells at me for a long time. Last time I was here, he smiled so cheerfully until we got home then he took off his belt and hit me until it didn't hurt anymore and told me if I didn't start cleaning my teeth then he was going to—and Jesus, that's expensive we don't have this kind of money lying around. When he finally left me to go play his cards I was lying on the floor, sobbing by myself. I stayed there for awhile because there was no real reason to get up and I guess I dozed off because the next thing I remembered was hearing my father barge back in drunk and almost stepping on me lying in the door way.

"Open wide." I snap out of my daydream to find the familiar face of my dentist and his Hawaiian flower shirt and fake grin staring at me and realized I'd done it again. Sometimes I start thinking and I sort of leave my body. Not for too long, but I don't think about what is happening during these times, it's like I go somewhere else. It helps a lot when he's hitting me. I feel for my rock. I wonder if anyone checks the dentist's teeth because they definitely need some work poor guy he probably doesn't have anyone to check if he's been brushing his teeth.

"You need to open your mouth so we can see your teeth, son." The dentist repeats himself and I can't stop staring at the ugly mouth. Part of me is scared to open my mouth but I catch my father in the corner of my eye and know that I have to. I feel for my rock, and open my mouth slowly.

He immediately starts poking at my gums and they start to bleed and I can taste metal. I know what metal tastes like. Once when my father was gone for a long time and there was no food in cupboards that I could reach even with a chair, and I was so hungry so to feel like I was eating food I wrapped my mouth around a spoon and started to chew on that. I thought how clever I was because I was going to trick my stomach into thinking I was eating. I chewed on it for a long time and at one point I was pretty sure I tasted something like soup except without olives because my dad sometimes puts olives in my soup and I've never liked that so it was soup with potatoes and carrots and even some meat and I could feel it all going down my throat and after awhile I got so full that I threw up. My father was not happy when he got back and found the carpet dirty and he sent me to my room and told me I could have no dinner that night which I thought was just as well since I'd eaten so much.

"Your teeth look very nice. I can tell you've been brushing. You are going to get a toothbrush and a toy. Now do you want green or blue?" I looked at him and thought it very silly to give me another toothbrush because I brushed my teeth so well but I took the blue one and a slinky and smiled with relief that I didn't have any problems. I touched the rock in my pocket, almost thanking it for my success.

I showed my father my new slinky and toothbrush but I don't think he cares very much but I ask if he ever got his teeth checked and he says no so I tell him if he wants he could have my blue toothbrush because I don't really need it. He doesn't say anything. I think maybe he didn't hear me.

He leaves again that night to go play cards and I stay home and crawl under the blankets in my bed and set my rock down on the floor next to me and I pull out a book. I'm going to start school in another year and I can't wait to finally understand what the little markings on the paper meant. I wonder if when I knew what they were if they would look different and if they would lose the beautiful and mysterious shape they had now. Maybe they would look even more beautiful because they could tell me their secrets and we could be friends. I reach over and touch my rock, just so it would know I'm not thinking about replacing it or anything because nobody could ever replace it because my mother gave it to me and nothing could replace her.

I look at the markings on the page and compare them to the swirls on the paint above my head and wonder if they have anything in common. Perhaps there's a secret message up there that I'm supposed to figure out. Maybe if I figured out what it said I could talk to the other kids at the park and we would have something in common and it would be like a secret code.

I decide this makes sense and spend the rest of the night trying to find a pattern until I slowly fall asleep and I don't even wake up when my dad comes home drunk but I find food on the counter in the morning so he must have. He is at work now, and won't be back for awhile. Which is good because I have time to work on my patterns.

The food doesn't look very good. It is toast and a can of olives. Sometimes I think he knows that I don't like olives and gives them to me so much on purpose just because he doesn't like them either and has too many of them. Either way, I guess I'll eat the toast but I need the chair to reach them so I drag it over and it makes an ugly screeching noise on the floor. I turn around, holding my toast and thinking it would be better with butter, and see a very confused lady standing in my father's bedroom doorway.

"Hello," I say mainly because that's what people say when they meet each other. I'm not surprised to see her here. He always brings someone home. Usually they're girls and they stay until morning or they're his friends and they leave late at night.

"Good morning." She says, still slightly puzzled. Based on her face, I think she is hung-over so I politely tell her where the aspirin and coffee beans are located and take my toast into the other room. I think about asking her if she could help me with my ceiling markings but she doesn't strike me as the smart type so I leave her be with her headache.

"I can cook you some eggs." She says after drinking a cup of coffee. I nod that would be all right but then remember that we don't have any eggs. I tell her that she doesn't have to be polite and she can leave because chances are she doesn't even remember my dad's name and she should really get away because he has a temper and because she looks nice I add that it was nice to meet her. Suddenly she looks terribly frightened and she takes her things and calls a cab. But that's okay because I'm not really a fan of eggs anyway.

They remind me of my mother, and how she would make breakfast so much better than anyone else. She made French toast and taught me how, and would cook up some potatoes and sing while she worked and she would wake up my father and me with a kiss and we would both giggle because she was the princess not the prince but it was okay because we were happy and she was pretty and breakfast was warm and we sat as a family. They would ask me how I'd slept and up until mom got sick we would go for long walks outside. In fact, it was on one of these long walks that I found my rock that I have now.

We spotted it mainly because of the gold crack down the middle. "This is an extraordinary rock." My mother assured me and told me to put it in my pocket. She explained to me that certain people were like this rock, special. And that those people were harder to find.

I asked her if dad was a golden rock and she of course said yes. But I noticed a split second of hesitation before she spoke and that is something I have never been able to forget. I look in my father's face and see the face of a hundred other people on the street but when I would look in my mother's eyes I saw a golden fleck. One that couldn't be found anywhere else. I miss that fleck a lot. It was my favorite thing in the world and I didn't notice how much I loved it until she got sick with something the doctors had a gross word for called Cancer. I didn't like the word, it sounded like choking and tasted like dust that had been dampened by tears and then one day we had to put her into a box and all of these people lined up and said how sorry they were for what had happened but no one knew what it felt like. It broke something in me. The Cancer had taken away the gold fleck from her eye and had broken mine in half, if I ever even had one. I cried until I couldn't cry anymore everyday. My dad got sad but I guess showed it differently and started to buy a lot more bottles than he used to and if he ever had a chance at growing a gold speck it was lost and any of my mother's gold speck that had rubbed off on him was gone. All gone.

I find that remembering this story causes me to cry again and I cry the way you'd wring out a damp towel. Then when the towel is dry I continue to wring it out and until my arms get tired I kept this up. Then I reach over and touch my rock and feel a little bit more all right.

My dad comes home and something is not right because he is drunk and he had only been at work. He never came home drunk from work. He came in and immediately started yelling things at me and I get very scared and I don't know what to do. This is worse than the time when I hadn't brushed my teeth because now I didn't know what I'd done wrong so there was no way for me to fix it. I think about hiding but I figure that would just make him more mad so I stay put and shut my eyes, willing myself invisible.

"What the hell is the matter with you? How many times have I told you to lock the door when I'm out?" He actually had never told me this but something in his tone told me now was not the time to mention that so I just shrug and try not to make eye contact with the terrifying monster my dad had drunk up inside of his belly. "And what about these lights? Why aren't these lights turned off in here? Are you in this room? No! Jesus Christ I swear, you're running me broke!"

"I'm sorry." I reply quietly because I'm not sure what else to say.

"Sorry? I'm over here working my ass off to support this family and you're sorry? Well golly, Nick. If you're sorry then that will pay the bills. Oh, five-hundred dollars for an electricity bill and you're sorry." He stopped yelling and for a second I think he's done but then he looked at me with something scarier than his anger. He looks at me with apathy. "Come here right now or you'll really be sorry."

I have no choice but to walk over to him. Before I go I suddenly get an idea. I grab the rock from the floor next to me and shove it into my pocket. Maybe it is the golden crack inside of me or maybe it is just because I am sick and tired of hurting and being afraid but I know that he would never hit me again. If he touched me—

"I said get over here."

Taking deep breathes and slow steps I walk up to my father. I wonder briefly if the other people in the apartment complex ever hear my sobs and the pounding of our feet and if they did how many cats they had to convince themselves we owned in order to sleep at night.

He reaches for my collar and draws me closer to him. I smell the whiskey on his breath and the cigarette smoke that lingered with him always. I hadn't seen him smoke in months, which struck me as odd but maybe his clothes were just permanently soiled. He muttered something about losing his job to me, told me it was my fault my fault my fault but by then my mind was already someplace else, someplace warm. I was on a beach with my mother, a beach full of rocks with gold cracks and my father was just a shark in the ocean somewhere where he could never touch me because I wasn't going to go swimming. I was going to stay on the beach with my mom and the rocks and she leaned in close and smiled at me. Patting my ruffled hair she told me that I was going to be okay that I was all right because it wasn't my fault, it couldn't be—

"It's your fault, and you know why? Damn kid listen to me when I'm talking to you. Nothing you do is good. All you do is take my money and waste it you ungrateful little bastard are you listening to me? This is your fault! And when she got sick? That was your fault too! I hope you know that you—"

On my beach there was no such thing as cancer or sick and there wasn't whiskey or cigarette smells and nothing was my fault. Nothing was anybody's fault and we all just learned how to love because there was so much to love in a world filled with gold rocks. I begged to my mother to let me stay with her because I really loved it here and I was so happy and nothing hurt. I could spend forever just laying in the hot sand but she just looked at me and the pained look in her eyes told me everything I needed to know. That nothing she could say would make this better that I just had to look out at the tide and she loved me so much and her embrace told me I couldn't stay. She seemed regretful about it but I couldn't I just had to—

My vision starts getting hazy and I taste the metal in my mouth. It hurts so much so much and I can't stop crying and I think I am screaming the whole time because suddenly my throat is on fire but he doesn't stop hitting me and I remember the rock in my pocket and I pull it out and something inside of me snaps again but this time it snaps out of anger not sorrow and the rock is swung into my father's face and he yells—

Suddenly I can't make out the features in my mother's face quite as well. She is fading, becoming just a silhouette and I reach out to her and I want so badly for her to come back but she was sick and maybe that's forever and maybe it's not but I just wanted to stay and suddenly the sand is pixilated like I'm looking at it on a television screen, not really there. And I look into the sky and see all of the markings except now I can read them, I know what they say and they tell me everything I ever wanted to know they answer all of the questions that bounce back and forth across my mind when I'm trying to sleep at night and the sound of silence fills the bedroom like a drum and it's deafening and my questions have no answers some of them don't even have questions they're just gaps in knowing, gaps in thought because some things don't make sense like why do good people (gold people) get sick while bad people live and why do dentists give you toothbrushes when you don't need them and—

I hit him again, but all it does is make him more mad. He picks up my rock and he throws it against a wall, making a loud thud. I think maybe the next-door people will hear it and come rushing over and save me but they don't. Maybe that's what I am supposed to read, that things will go bad and the people next to you won't do a damn thing about it but what kind of lesson is that. But still maybe that's what my ceiling says because from up above it's seen everything that has happened in these rooms and some of the things it probably wants to forget but it can't and it can't stop them so it tries to warn me but I couldn't read the signs so it's too late but at least now I've learned. Now I've learned that it doesn't matter if you do what they say and you smile nice and say hello to strangers it doesn't matter if you have a gold speck and it doesn't matter if you get sick.

My mother comes into focus again and I hear her trying to tell me something so I strain my neck to listen but her words are so quiet and the silence is so loud. It's so loud and I don't know what it means but soon it is all that I hear.