#vacationdad

Unlike most of my friends growing up, I had a very far relation to my Father. 

As far as I could tell as even a middle-schooler, both my parents seemed to be swingers. They never dissolved their marriage in hopes of keeping some sort of financial gain, but as far as their care for each other went, they basically slept in separate beds. I found myself wondering about my physical conceptualization quite often, even knocking the thought of my Father being another man possibly. 

I wouldn’t of personally been surprised myself, as he never really treated me as if I was his own. The word ‘bastard’ felt tattooed on my forehead and I couldn’t quite escape the point that he never quite cared for me, his supposed child, but never explained why.

My Mother was distant, in some ways alike to him. She would disappear for elongated periods of time. I found myself alone a lot, some days feeling more a ghost than a living person. I would watch the sun lapse across the wall, no longer relying on a clock, I used the window and light as a dial. The further I drifted, the more absent they became, sometimes leaving me there alone for a week or longer. I couldn’t quite remember a time where things were different anymore.

Soon they returned home. This time they could hardly look at each other, and when put in any sort of proximity the anger and disdain seemed to teem like a hot summer sun. I listened through the wall late that night to overhear their conversations.  

“Do you think he knows honey?”, my Mom said.

“That he’s dead? I think he hasn’t a clue”, my Father said.

“Hasn’t he wondered about the dreams, where they are really coming from? Does he truly think that’s god?”, my Mom said.

“I don’t know. What I do know is that we can’t let him or the world know”, my Father responded

“He never left The Cradle, did he?”, my Mother said.

A definite silence then over took the room. My nights usually full of colorful dreams I would write in stories by the morning, were left sleepless after overhearing that conversation. It wasn’t exactly them that cued it, but I was questioning my waking reality far before they implied there might be reason to. I worried about how much control I truly had. I would wake up waiting for a call or a check in the mail, something to help get me out. But all I’d find is the perpetual blur of a suburb locked in a sort of modern purgatory. Was I doing this by expecting it? If I just changed one usual variable, would that be the unexpected solution? Then this talk of some sort of dream agency, writing both my dreams and nightmares, not to mention if these people had some sort of ability to document subconscious lucidity they could be making literal variable of my inputs. The possibilities seemed endless.

Early the next morning, Father would awake earlier than usual. He readies a few luggage cases and puts in one silver case. A solvent he sprayed outside my room kept me from awakening to his new plot. He awakens Genova, my Mother, telling her they are going on a long trip, like he does every week. Before she enters the car he engages some stone-age self modified child-lock. When she gets in the car, he grabs her and uses a rag with a chloroform mixture over her mouth.

I awoke alone again. A strange smell lingered in the house. My head felt three times it’s size and some sort of chemical seemed to clog my breathing through mouth and nostril.

Not too far off in a derelict hotel called “The Little Rabbit”, my supposed Father props my unconscious Mother on an old Hotel bed. He ties her to each post with rope. He turns a TV on at the full volume. She awakens in a sweat panicking. As she looks at him she can’t see his face or body, just a Black shadow at the foot of the bed. He recites a few words, in Latin, and a strange orb of light starts to float about the room. The bright orb bounces about then lands right in my Mother’s mouth as she screams for help. Almost immediately her eyes shift to a different color.

“My daughter Persephone, how I’ve missed you”, he says trying to comfort her.

With the new presence in her body he undoes the ropes.

When Mother and Father returned that day, I asked where they had been this time.

Father said they had just retuned from far away, not to ask any more questions. He seemed tired, older as well. He said Mother was sick and she wouldn’t be talking much. I looked at her really quick as she walked in and for a second I could swear she had a different face. I dismissed this as some sort of distortion.

Something about them both seemed not quite right. It was like a bad odor you couldn’t quite describe. I felt like every time I left a room they sat around listening to whatever I was doing, making fronted conversations to cover what seemed to be an abundance of surveillance. I would of felt this being destiny, if I hadn’t known my actual Father.

The man pushed out first by this Black shadow of a person, was my Father. Framed and coerced by shadows and infallible amounts of time, he broke under the spell of an illusion contrived by only the most heinous.

That was how this man took over my Father’s body and one by one he turned everyone into a version of himself. Like a mass conscience experiment gone far wrong, he had long stopped realizing the cost of his parasitical behaviors. He tried hard to take me. I never quite broke though. I built refuges from his insanity, and didn’t take their narrative as my own. I just knew somehow that these people weren’t my people.

The next morning I could see in my Mother’s eyes that she was taken as well. I didn’t even have to start a conversation to know she’d say exactly what he’d want regardless of my statement or inquiry. It was like living with a wall.

I wondered after if my Mother had left and the trick was really on him. But as time grew on it seemed the trick was on everyone else for believing a fraud.

I wondered what he was after and at a certain point, I realized it was me.

Years ago my Grandpa gave me a knife and I hid this knife on my bedside. He told me to never use it unless I really had to.

Late that night, something paralyzed me. It seemed to be a big dark shadow at the foot of my bed, chanting words that rendered me tired and in a sort of paralysis. I looked in it’s eyes, without fear, searched for eyes in that mass of darkness and saw the ones that over took my Mother. A flash of strength gained in me and I grabbed the knife. I immediately stabbed at the shadows throat. As the blade slipped in, a bright light bled out and a high-pitched noise surrounded, growing with it’s glow

I awoke on a grassy hill, surrounded by Yellow daffodils. Grass sprawled for miles and miles. A feeling of euphoria and heat overtook me, and guided me forward. The coldness of the world I had come from seemed to subside with the growing space that surrounded me. Whether I was living or dead, or in somewhere I recognized or not, no longer mattered.

VACATION DAD - L I V I N