#chad barton

Directors: Eric Huber and Chad Barton

Gaffer: Charlie Metz

Director: Chad Allen Barton DP: Eric Huber

by Chad Allen Barton     It burned deep inside him and the porous, hot flesh had to be quenched by something more than he, or any man could acquire in life.     An empty mind.     He has to get off, and get this feeling out of him.     A fire.     His consciousness returned to him again.     Mom and Dad walked through my apparently open door and interrupted my attempt at masturbating. I acted like I had just gotten out of the shower at two in the morning. They wouldn’t know. It was the usual by now. After I dressed myself, they told me to be expecting another sibling. Grins stretched across their faces. They closed the door and it slowly swung back open. My door malfunctioned from the time my dad had reinstalled it. I got up, pushed it shut and no longer had the urge to try to relieve myself. Probably for the best anyway.     I sat for a moment wondering what my parents could possibly be thinking. I covered my eyes with my hands and pressed hard. Millions of tiny multicolored spheres appeared in the dark and my imagination shot me out of oblivion via uterine cannon into yet more darkness, tickled by cilia and left to wander through cervixes and uteri and fallopian tubes. I burrowed through tiny crevices in the human anatomy, like my soon to be sibling had recently done. My instincts or what I perceived to be my instincts drove me towards one specific egg out of the possible four hundred thousand. Penetrating the surface, I felt safe and content, unconscious. When I finally realized how far my mind had traveled into the female genitalia, I mentally back tracked out of the vagina, to a picture of my mom. The one where she held me after I was born. I shook my head.     I needed my parents to tell me why. Tell me what they were, if they were, thinking about what they were doing. I walked out into the hallway, over to the other side of the house where the master bedroom was. Some goomba was yelling at some other wop about money or drugs or some nonsense, a gunshot. I rapped on the door. After a moment, I pressed my ear to the door, but could only hear the gun battle that had broken out in T.V. land. I knocked again and heard my dad yell at my mom about the baby’s name. Apparently, he liked the name Devin for a boy and she couldn’t disagree more. This escalated to why she bought a new crib, when they still had mine upstairs that wouldn’t have cost them anything. She fired back with comments such as: cheapskate, Jew, and fag. The last derogatory comment had been in reference to his hobbies, which she deemed “faggy.” She said that she could only hope that the next child wouldn’t take any interest in his pastimes. If I interrupted now, they’d have probably taken out their anger on me.     I walked downstairs and sat in front of the blank television screen and the dark hearth adjacent to it. The television still appeared to be on. This meant that they had only turned off the satellite box.     Jesus.     I reached over and pushed the power button on the side of the television. The screen still appeared to be lit. Was plastic made from something once alive? I noted to myself to remember and ask Jeeves later, and my attention went back to the hearth, six inches of ash under the grating. This was a fire occasion. I put on my jacket and shoes  and went to retrieve wood from the backyard. A fresh dusting of snow covered the pile.     As I scraped the snow off the pieces I wanted, I put myself in this wood’s position. I often thought about inanimate objects like people; especially when Mom and Dad told me to throw away what they deemed junk in my room. These things consisted of old drawings, collages, blurry pictures I’d taken with a disposable camera, old homework and toys from a time when I had no conscious thought. I’d hidden them, because I didn’t want to see them go. I didn’t want them to be hurt, so I tucked them and so many other things in certain hiding spots, like the hole I had cut out of my closet wall with a kitchen knife. With much difficulty, I pulled out the fiberglass insulation and threw it away instead of doing as instructed. I took out the trash myself, so they would never know. My hands hurt for weeks from the fiberglass, but I knew it was for the greater good. The same stinging brought me back to reality as I tried to grab the frozen wood and I retracted my arm, looking at the snow melting away. I knew what was going to happen to the wood once I brought it inside, and the worst part, it was going to be my doing.     I shook this feeling. The only thing those thoughts ever got me was a hand covered in fiberglass and a belt beating my ass. Once my parents discovered the junk in the wall, they took my door off the hinges. I didn’t get it back for a year. My mom said I was becoming antisocial and needed to be watched. The oaks behind my house glared as I picked three of their fallen brethren and several handfuls of their leafy appendages for the funeral pyre. The eyes in the back of my skull sucked back in and rejoined their siblings that were concentrating on finding the driest pieces. Those trees couldn’t hold anything against me anyway. Their dismembered pals had been gone for weeks now. Not to give their corpses a proper sending would be both blasphemy, and am utter waste of burnable matter.     A few of the leaves escaped back outside as I shut the door, which suffered the same defect of all of the doors my dad installed. I bumped it shut and dumped the wood and stray leaves onto the bricks in front of the hearth and the floor. The room seemed to be narrower. Were the walls closing in on me? I opened the doors to the fireplace and grabbed an elongated match and piled the wood in a teepee shape, shoving some leaves in the middle. I lit the leaves and watched as the fire sparked to life. I looked over my shoulder.     Nothing there.     I looked back to the door and saw the ridiculous amount of leaves that had blown inside during that short time. They were all wet and clung to the floor. I felt for them, but they needed to go back outside before I went to sleep tonight.     As the fire grew in strength, I remembered when we learned about the American settlers taking over Indian lands. We were watching a PowerPoint in the computer lab about which Indians lived where. The teacher encouraged us to do some of our own research, which I actually did. I always seemed to be the only one in class who cared about anything other than video games and sports. I found a painting of a massive teepee in flames. American soldiers stood outside and blockaded any escape. Some of the Indians were shown fleeing and soldiers were picking them off. The majority could be seen in silhouette, burning alive in their home. The fire roared to full strength and I crossed my legs, sitting directly in front of it.     I felt something staring at me and out of my peripherals I saw the guest bedroom door cracked. I cautiously stood and approached the door. My hand penetrated the darkness and probed the wall for the light switch. I felt the tiny protrusion on the wall and flicked it up, only to have it go half way up and come back down. I leaned farther within the void and flipped the switch all the way up. Light spewed forth, coating the room and myself in a yellow hue. In the far corner, the bed where my parents had probably conceived it one night after my father had been kicked out due to some argument.     That side was directly under my parent’s room. Even I knew my dad only got action during mom’s fits of anger. She would kick him out to the guest room, where later she would sneak in during the night and raucous moans and muffled words tainted the sparse silence of the house. On the other side of the room stood my dad’s desk with a now ancient iMac, located directly under where my room was. He collected butterflies and cataloged the corpses using Google, finding where they originally dwelled and frolicked. The fragile butterfly corpses were pinned inside a glass case and displayed prominently on the wall. Alongside that, a dear head stared at anyone who entered the room. I locked eyes with the taxidermy deer. As much as I wished she would have never been shot and stuffed, I was glad my dad hadn’t surrendered to mother’s belittling comments about the cadavers on the wall. At least they were inside, away from the snow. The air in this room seemed viscous, boiling. Poor circulation plagued this room due to a lack of an air return. In the reflection of the computer monitor I spotted a large box behind the door. After shutting the door, I saw an infant with two adults with the same shit-eating grins my parents had when they told me of the tragedy to come. I could feel the walls crawling with microorganisms, trying valiantly to reproduce and continue their race. They were under my feet. I was crushing them. I wanted to jump on the desk to stop the carnage, but I knew they were there too. One gargantuan orgy going on around me. Someone with their finger stuck on the copy button with no remorse for what they were doing. Papers spilling  in the recycling, onto the floor. Doomed to be remade once again. I opened the door and slammed it shut behind me. I could still hear my parents fighting and gunshots emanating from the television.     My parents kept calming tea and bath salts in bulk in a closet in the hallway. I needed something to stop this. I squirted some sanitizer on my hands as I passed through the living room. Something else my parents kept stocked and spread throughout the house. As I approached the door, I could smell something like rotting flesh. My parents didn’t know what a durian was and they were no more murderers than any other omnivore, so I had no idea what to expect as I turned the knob.         Chicken wings. They must have been there for days. Flies gorged themselves on the scraps of flesh still left on the bone. Sacks of fly eggs jiggled and looked to be on the verge of bursting. I vomited into the closet, kicking the door shut with my leg as I fell against the wall behind me. I stumbled down the hallway and collapsed right before the living room. The hand sanitizer still stung. The tiny life forms living on my fingers still burning and bursting out of existence. I struggled to my feet, grasping onto countertops. I needed this taste out of my mouth. I stumbled past the fire that seemed both satisfying and volcanically hot and I shot through the living room with dried leaf remains crunching under my feet to the backdoor, which had swung open again.     Once on the cold, shattered grass, I dropped to my knees and scooped up small amounts of snow into my mouth. As the snow hit my arid, burning tongue, it evaporated. I continued shoving snow onto my tongue. The temperature in my mouth and the temperature of the snow kept battling it out until an equilibrium was finally reached. I could swear it felt like the snow around me was melting, like in an old cartoon where a character ate something hot and dipped his head in the snow to cool off.     Quenched now, I stood up, my feet numb at this point, and craned my neck up and to the side, staring at the infinite blackness and tiny points of light that watched me. A shooting star or maybe a falling satellite fell across the sky. I followed it as it plunged into the darkness. In this position, I couldn’t even see the tree line, only black and white. I searched for the moon, but it had apparently taken the night off. It couldn’t stand to watch this tragedy, tonight. At least it could disappear for a while, not to mention that it was up there, away from all this. Nothing but dust and rock, quiet and still.     The sun would be up in a few hours. Children thousands of miles away were probably scorching ants with magnifying glasses. The sun also had its charm. On the opposite side of the spectrum from the moon, it was a burning ball of energy, where nothing within millions of miles could exist. This thought warmed me. I could feel my scrunched up toes again in the now torrid, tindery grass and the flames of the sun lapping at my thin skin. My thoughts melted away, as my flesh followed with them.      The house was burning to ash, relinquishing its energy back from where it had been borrowed. Hopefully next time it would be put to better use.        

DP & Editor: Chad Barton

DP: Shelby Baldock