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is what my mother used to call my father.
She would say, and look at me.
Since the day I was born until I was ten, I lived in a small room with walls that felt like they were closing in, squishing everything together. There were no windows, no sunlight, just four cracked walls that always seemed to frown at me.
I never knew what lay beyond that door frame; the outside world was nothing but a distant concept, something I saw in books or imagined in my mind when I stared at the ceiling for hours. I used to think maybe the world outside was just like our room—dark and quiet.
My father liked to go out a lot. He'd leave and come back smelling like the sour stuff from his bottles he liked so much. His face would be all scrunched up and red, his eyes looking at me and my mother like we were dirt he had to step over. When he got mad, he hit us. He hit her the most, and she just let him. This was what life was supposed to be.
My mother was always gone too, but not like him. She went out to work because somebody had to. She stayed out as long as She could, working at all kinds of places. she never looked at me. Not really. She looked through me, like I was just another crack in the wall, another flaw in her life that she couldn’t fix.
Sometimes, I’d catch her kneeling on the floor, crying so much that her whole body shook. Other times, her grief turned to rage, cursing my father, promising to one day cut his throat while he slept, to end the nightmare with her own two hands.
One night, when my father was snoring loud on the couch, I decided to be a good son. I remembered my mother's words. I thought, maybe I could help her. Maybe if I did what she said, she wouldn't cry or get angry all the time.
So I went to the kitchen and found the knife with the dull blade. I stood over him as he lay sprawled out on the couch, his mouth open, his face slack. I pressed the knife against his throat, just like she said she would, just like how I remembered her cutting vegetables on the rare days we had them.
Red came rushing out, and it soaked into the couch. He gurgled once, his eyes going wide, then empty. Just like that, he was silent. He wasn't angry anymore. He didn't shout, and he didn't hit me either. My mother was right. I smiled.
I didn’t understand what I had exactly done, but I thought I’d done something good, like I’d fixed something. But when I turned to my mother, her eyes were different. She wasn't smiling. Her eyes remained the same, carrying the same look as when she looked at father, but this time, her gaze didn't pass through me. It was directed at me.
"a monster" is what she called me.
The next day, my mother was gone too.
She wasn’t on the floor or the couch; she was hanging from the ceiling, swinging gently like she was taking a nap in the air.
I called out to her, but she didn’t answer. She always used to cry or scream or say something, but now she was just... quiet, like father. I thought maybe she was mad at me, like I did something wrong, but I didn’t know what.
Days went by, and I started feeling this gnawing pain in my belly. There was no food left, nothing to eat. I didn't know what to do. I called out to my mother, but she still wouldn’t answer. The room smelled strange and heavy, like it was sick. I was getting weaker, my head felt fuzzy, and all I wanted was for the quiet to stop.
And that's when the landlady came. She opened the door and started screaming, her face all twisted and pale. After that, a lot of other people with strange clothes came as well.
That was the first time I stepped past the door frame. The first time I saw the infinite blue called the sky, and the giant unflickering light bulb called the sun.
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