20 A Blackness Like This (2/2)

Your mouth, yes . . . open it . . . Goooood –

Hmm.

Meat, raw, cold, moist meat, grazed my bottom lip and lay

on my tongue – Now close it . . . Your mouth . . . Close, yes . . . yes, yes . . . Yes, close it around it like that . . . Goooood . . . Chips, that feels good?

Hmmm, the Chips moaned.

The meat began to grow and fill my mouth, expanding my cheeks, so much that I thought my small mouth would burst!

Then it began to touch the beginning of my throat; a cough blocked off by this chunk of meat became a gag and choked me . . .

My eyes began to water behind the blindfold, and in that moment of my dying, the white realization hit me that my foster father had actually led me here to be killed; I had come to the end of my usefulness. . .

The water behind the blindfold became tears and soaked the cloth.

Was this how it would all end, in darkness, in silence, words and screams blocked off . . . Was this how death was? That a person didn't know they were dying until the point of death, the point where the dying has reached the end . . .

I stopped when I heard the moans above me turn to anguished screams and I tasted blood in my throat, on my tongue – LET ME GO! LET ME GO!

I knew that voice! I knew that voice!

Somebody broke the door open. And it wasn't until the big slap unlocked my teeth that I realized they had been holding on to the chunky piece of meat in my mouth.

The cough finally escaped, throwing out a spray of red with

it.

ARGHHHH!

Yes, I knew that voice.

Fists and boots were already scattering all over my body with malicious enthusiasm.

I began to slip away, from the scene, through the floor of the room, falling, slowly, into another darkness, a darkness deeper than the one behind the blindfold, deeper than the one in the room I was kept. . . a darkness like death; warm, soft, sweet . . . I had never known a darkness like it.

But through this approaching darkness, s.n.a.t.c.hes of what seemed to be a distant exchange penetrated:

Where the f.u.c.k did you get such a wild f.u.c.ker? I didn't ask for an animal!

I don't know . . . He had always been a good boy . . .

f.u.c.k you, Pappy! I paid for a good mouth not a good boy! Yes, I knew the voice!

I'm sorry, man. I have called the doctor . . . Meanwhile let's get you out of here, away from this mess . . .

Arghhh . . . f.u.c.k.

I knew the voice; knew it as a milky voice, not how it is red

and hot like this.

The exchange continued as my father was carried out of the room, away from the mess . . .

His cries followed him out of the room. I held mine down in my throat as I fell deeper, out of my body – into nothing.

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