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My Fear in His Eyes Tyler Musty
 I don’t remember the first
time that he hit me, but I remember the first time that I fought back. He
came home complaining to my mother that there was nothing waiting for him on
the table. My eyes averted from a rerun of Seinfeld, I must have looked at him the wrong way. Coming at me,
his hand raised, I threw a lamp at him. Shattered it over his face. He went
down and I ran out the door, didn’t come home for three days. I got it in the
end, and he seemed satisfied with my bloodied nose, me looking up at him from
the floor through an eye that was swelling shut. I was fourteen. Before I was supposed to leave for college, I had grown
bigger than him, and he wouldn’t come near a fair fight. My mother would
appear some mornings with bruises when I hadn’t been home the night before.
He only touched her when I wasn’t around. When I finally walked in on them,
shades drawn, windows locked, blood oozed through her fingers grasping her
face onto the blue carpet he had made me clean my own blood stains from. I
saw the fear in his eyes that he used to see in mine. When I started beating him down off of her, she screamed for me to stop, something I couldn’t do. I hit him until he wasn’t breathing. I didn’t go to the funeral. They wouldn’t let me. But I
regret nothing. |
