Baking Cookies
28 Oct
A young boy is baking cookies with his kid sister when his father tells him to go to his room. The boy says that the cookies are in the oven and they’ll be done in five minutes. Can he just wait five more minutes?
His father is enraged. He asks the boy who he thinks he is to question his authority. He says that someday somebody is going to kill him. And he ponders who it might be. As he stands over the boy. Staring.
The boy isn’t scared because he’s learned that no physical or emotional pain is permanent. It lasts as long as it does and then it’s over. And he can take it. He’s already taken it for ten years. Since the day he saw his brother crying in the bathroom corner. Because their father had hit him again.
He decided that day that his brother would never cry like that again. So he told his father to go fuck himself. And his father never hit his brother again – he hit him instead. And now, ten years later, his father is seething. But the boy’s eyes are open and his heart is obstinate. The cookies are in the oven, he says. They’ll be done in five minutes.
His father stomps his feet. And shouts. And slams his fist against the counter. And picks up a cucumber and throws it across the kitchen. Which scares his kid sister. Who runs out of the room. Without any clue that the only reason their father isn’t pounding her brother’s face in is because of what happened a few years earlier.
When their father tried to kill their mother by putting his hands around her neck and squeezing. And saying do you want to die bitch, do you. And the boy called the police. And the police came. And their father and mother denied everything. And they bribed the boy to lie and say that he had imagined it all.
Not with money. They bribed him with the promise that everything would be better. Which was so much nicer to think about than anything money could buy. So the boy told the policemen and lawyers what they wanted to hear. And since then his father has used words that choke like death. But not hands.
Now his father is saying god fucking damn it why don’t you have any respect for authority. You little bastard. You fucking bastard. You’re really going to learn some day you… fucking bastard. And his mouth is foaming. And the boy can see that his wants so badly to pound his face in.
But his father restrains himself. Restrains himself. Until he feels a plug of semi-hardened mucus travel from his sinuses to his mouth. And he must get rid of it. To tell his boy one more thing about authority and respect. So he spits the mucus onto the boy’s face.
The boy doesn’t move. He stands still as the mucus drips from his forehead to his eyes to his nose to his chin to the ground. Doesn’t wipe his face. Just stands and looks at his father. Until the oven timer goes off. And he walks over to the oven and takes out the cookies.
And puts them on the kitchen counter. And walks to his room. And puts on his running shoes. And says goodbye to his sister. And runs out the front door. And keeps running. For hours. Until the sun sets. And he sits on a street corner. And watches it go. And decides that life is hard and even oppressive.
But that it won’t keep him down. It will beat him. And beat him up. But he’ll beat back. Again. And again. And a-fucking-gain. Because he knows that things have to get better. And he wants to be there when they do.