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You kill it, you eat it.
That shit might as well have been cross-stitched onto a neat white fabric and framed in the kitchen. It’s your father’s motto. Hell, it’s his raison d’être some days, it seems. His huge satisfied face leering at you when you were five years old…
“You know the golden rule” slipped out between his gnarled teeth as you stared at the hastily fried bullfrog on your plate. It stared right back.
The BB you shot it with is still stuck deep in its gut.
Your father chuckles as you retch, mocks you in a high-pitched voice: “but I don’t wanna eat the guts, daddy!” He laughs a little more, and then sobers quickly, snarling “well I don’t want to raise some shit-ass kid, but here we fucking are. Eat your frog.”
In the third grade you mentioned this in earshot of a teacher. In the counselor’s office, your father brushed it off as a silly inside joke. Families have inside jokes. That weekend, he locked you in your room for sixteen hours straight. Made you piss in the corner, made you clean it up later. When the hunger made you wail, your father forced Kurloz to carry you up a slingshot and the message ‘if you’re so damn hungry, go shoot a squirrel.’ You’re pretty sure this made Kurloz cry harder than you.
And now you’re seventeen and haven’t been forced to eat some woodland critter in three years. You’ve wizened up. You’ll kill whatever dumbass creature you fucking well please, just as long as your daddy isn’t there to see it. Now that you have the grace of retrospect, you guess he was probably trying to teach you that you only need to confront your fuck-ups when you get caught. That’s how he lives.
“I only want the best for you,” he tells you. Excuses, excuses. “I’m doing this for you.”
But you’re seventeen and you’re fine. It’s late at night. You know your father took Kurloz out to get something and it’s been a few hours now. You don’t worry. Having the house to yourself is nice. Now the only way that yells will seep into the tacky yellow wallpaper is if you want them to.
You shout a bit, just to feel in control. When a light goes on in the neighbor’s house it makes you snicker. You scream yourself up into your room and wiggle the baggie of weed out of Kurloz’s mattress. But your throat is already sore from the yelling so you can’t get nearly as high as you want without having a coughing fit. You’re really starting to miss the hookah; it was so smooth, like light cool water going into your lungs. Then you got angry at Kurloz and threw it at him and it splintered everywhere, and there hasn’t been enough money since to get a replacement. (It seems, sometimes, that the shards of the hookah’s bowl are still wedged between the floorboards, winking up at you when the light finds them.)
For five minutes, things are nice. Then the car pulls in and the door bangs open and the yelling kicks back up but this time you can’t stop it. You finish the bowl and limp downstairs.
The kitchen is a blur of anger and sobs. You’re a little higher than you thought, actually, and now all you can do is sit at the table, watch the bare bulb swinging over your head. Slowly you pick the skin from your wrists, think that maybe later you’ll burn up your arms with a lighter. Your father bangs the pans around. Kurloz shakes against a wall. He looks to be collapsing in on himself. He looks so, so sick.
Finally you open your ears, realize what’s happening. Kurloz hit a cat while driving home. Now he’s got to eat it. You let out a low whistle.
“You want some too?” Your father roars, waving the poor flattened thing about by its tabby tail. You shake your head so slowly. It makes him impatient.
He viciously skins it into the sink. He’s so pissed his hands shake and he fucks it all up. You try so hard not to laugh but it doesn’t quite work and next thing you know his massive bloody hands are on the back of your neck, making you skin the cat and assuring you that you’re worthless.
“Hey, whatever you say, bro.” You grin easily at him. God, you’re so out of it, a tiny part of your brain is telling you to just shut up and skin the nasty thing. You’ve had to survive around this man for your entire life and you still can’t figure out how not to piss him off even when you’re sober. Sometimes you simply marvel at how you haven’t been brutally murdered yet.
As he smashes your forehead into the faucet, you idly rub the dead cat’s blood-wet ears. They probably used to be fuzzy, you suppose as your vision darkens at the corners.
“Geez, geez, calm down motherfucker.” You pat his face as your own bruises and bleeds.
“Skin the goddamn cat.” He fires up the stove. You whistle as you work and he eventually joins in with vocals. Moods change so quickly in this house. A minute ago and you were within a heartbeat of being strangled, now your father hoarsely sings Tom Waits to you. He’s an awful singer. Some rational whorl of your brain stamps a filter into place and you don’t say anything.
Kurloz is still in the corner. You try to smile at him, realizing a little too late that it probably isn’t comforting. You’re covered in blood, a conspirator in this attack on his sanity, and sooner or later he’s going to figure out that you just smoked almost half of his weed.
Haha.
Oops.
As you skin the cat you begin to feel bad for your brother. He’s the sort who scoops up spiders and takes them out to the garden instead of squishing them. He’s gotten stung and bitten and scratched more times than you can count. Half the time, his tenderness with animals disgusts you, but when you feel just right, like now, it’s pretty cute perhaps. He just cares so goddamn much about every living thing: just the fact that he killed this cat is going to make him unbearably miserable.
You mouth ‘sorry’ at him. When your father forces him to eat this thing…goodness, there’s not enough weed in the world to get you high enough to stomach watching that. You’ll stick around anyway because your father would probably haul you back in here by your fingernails if you tried to leave. He likes proving his point.
The cat is skinned, then boiled. Your father is too furious to take the bones and organs out. He dumps it on a plate, still soggy, and pops out its tiny little eyeballs with a ballpoint pen. They are tossed out the window.
“Eat it.” He speaks into your brother’s ear. Kurloz’s hands are shaking too much for him to even hold the fork and knife. “Fucking eat it, you weak cunt.”
Kurloz drops his chin down to his chest and bunches his twiggy little shoulders up and gasps out this near-silent sob that makes your throat go scarily thick. You push off the table and walk to where they stand over the cat on the counter.
“Hey now motherfuckers,” you whisper, putting a hand on Kurloz’s back and glancing at your dad, “maybe we should all just calm down a little.”
Your father shoves you off, jarring your hip against a counter. That’s going to bruise something awful.
“He’s going to eat it. Aren’t you, boy?” Your father’s thumb, padded in calluses and scars, pulls at Kurloz’s weak mouth. He grabs his jaw, muttering about how it’s so narrow, so effeminate. “Now eat.”
All is quiet for many seconds. You can hear the lovely, warm summer night carry on, resplendent in crickets and frogs down in the river across the road and your chickens murmuring amongst themselves out back. The sky is so clear, the air so fine…you wish you could have spent tonight up on the roof smoking with Kurloz, or hunkered down under the pines and the willows by the river. But instead you stand in your kitchen with moths smashing themselves to a clear pulp on the lightbulb, with the blood drying on your eyelids, casually watching a misery you are helpless to stop.
Everything is just so messy all the time.
As in a daze, you watch as your father tears a strip of meat from the cat’s back leg and holds it up in front of Kurloz, prying his mouth open with his other hand. He makes him eat it. You watch your father gloat, your brother shiver in suppressed nausea. The silence continues until all you can hear is Kurloz’s desperate, queasy swallow.
“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” Your father says, edging the plate closer to Kurloz. “Come on. Not much left. You can handle it. You can do this one thing. This single fucking thing goddammit you can do one mind-fuckingly easy task right? Right boy? Give your old man one thing to remember about you that doesn’t make him endlessly ashamed.”
Kurloz turns and bolts out the front door. You bolt right after him, your father’s yells pushing at your heels. He stands on your front porch, absolutely roaring at you to not come back, not tonight, not ever.
You find Kurloz in your favorite circle of pines, vomiting on his hands and knees. You drop next to him, pressing your flat palms to his stomach and your face to his back. This is what you usually do: he gets himself fucked over somehow, sometimes by your father and sometimes by you, and then you always track him down and convince him not to kill himself. When you’re the reason he’s like this, which is more often than you want to recognize at the moment, you go through these motions to assuage your guilt. You never really want to hurt him; you just get so angry sometimes and he’s such an easy target…so beautifully silent through whatever you do to him. Kurloz is a sickly blessing.
Eventually he stops heaving and rolls onto his back, wrapping you around him. You fall asleep like that, holding your brother with your ear on his heart and your face stinging and the smell of vomit mingling with the sweetness of the night flowers. It’s somewhat nice, you suppose, even if everything is actually rather awful at the moment.
You get up with the sun. That couldn’t have been more than three hours of sleep. From the looks of it, Kurloz hasn’t slept at all. You pull him up to his feet, brushing pine needles and loam off of him.
“C’mon. Dad’s got to be asleep. I’ll get cleaned up, then we can hole up in our room. Sound good?”
He nods. You smile a little, tuck him into your side even though he’s exceptionally taller than you are.
Your father isn’t even home, so it gives you two plenty of time in the bathroom to clean up. Kurloz brushes his teeth meticulously, then sponges the blood off your face as you sit on the edge of the toilet. While he takes a piss, you go back in the kitchen and toss the cat out the window. Maybe you’ll bury it later.
You load up on food in the kitchen, and a couple bottles of room-temperature coke. Then you take one of your dad’s hunting rifles and ammo, just to be safe. This is a crazy house. Need to be ready for anything.
Kurloz is in your shared room when you get there, sitting cross-legged on the bed and pulling the bong out of its box. You smile, locking the door and dropping the goods on your bed. He frowns when he finds his weed half gone and you only smile wider.
“Sorry, bro. I’ll get some more tonight. Promise.”
You both smoke it all, then stretch out across the bed so your legs hang off one end, your heads off the other. Kurloz starts crying again, but only a little bit this time. He does so silently, just like he does most of everything, and you only notice something’s wrong (more wrong than usual) when he sniffs too loudly.
“Aw, come on, don’t do that.” You roll to your side, sticking your chin into his chest. “It’s all good now, come on, all good now.” He shakes his head a tiny bit and you feel a gross twist of pity. “Don’t need these, brother.” You wipe at his face, trying to get the tears off, but you only smear them around his cheeks. “God just…we’ll make it, you hear?”
He nods.
“No, I mean, you hear me?”
He pauses a moment. Then, without looking at you, he whispers out “Yes, brother, I hear.” You grin. His gorgeous voice, just for you.
“Good. Now you believe it. We’ll make it.”