A Father's Worth © A.R.Curry
His eyes opened.
Darkness riddled his vision, but what little outlines he could make out were blurred by his tiredness and he quickly found himself engulfed, wrestling his fatigue—his anxiety. Yet nothing else troubled him; nothing forced his nerves to push back against his current state of pestilent exhaustion and so, growing content with the stillness of the dark, he let them flutter back shut. Let sleep re-inject itself.
…Falling. Everyone he loves vanishing, vanishing into the swelling distance above. Black birds swooping, pecking, cawing all around. Swarming in a dizzying twister of rage, ripping at his cloths, at his flesh. Falling. Down, down. Darkness. Helplessness. Everyone he loves, gone. Black birds swooped them away. Pecked them apart. Cawed, without answer, at their leftover bones. All around, all around, they still cawed! Darkness….
His eyes sprang back open becoming blitzed by the rush of sudden obscurity. Yet he lay, uncertain of the offbeat awareness tugging at his now alert mind. Wind whistled long, drawn-out notes as it blew flakes of snow against the nearby window. He could feel the subtle vibrations of his wife's breathing as she basked in pleasant dreams and even hear the soft snore of their dog on the other side of her. All was outwardly well, bar for something else, something odd, displaced and hanging in the empty air as if the very darkness threatened to envelop his soul. What he sensed, he thought, was an unusual, unsettling quietness. A silence that, paradoxically, made a distinguished noise of its own. He thought it seemed to penetrate those sounds, which to him, were amplifying with his growing cautiousness. The creak of ice freezing the façade of the small apartment; the deep roar of the furnace kicking in.
Grasping the cross round his neck, he contemplated.
What is it? What doesn't feel right? Why does it seem like someone's here?
And indeed it did seem that way to him. A feeling of someone watching, stalking, planning, dropped down on him and sickened his stomach with worry. With his ears having settled into a deer's exclusive audible frequency, each sound crackled with distinguished decibels. In the darkness he heard a static, a rustling and a sigh, a yawn and a faint whimper of his dreaming baby boy through the monitor near the door. Sitting straight, he tossed the blanket to the side and leapt from the bed, blindly slapping at the darkness for his metal bat. Tiny sparkles of phantom light riddled his vision and blurred from side to side like a white sparkler on the 4 th of July. “huMmm,” his wife groaned, “stop hogging the blanket.”
He ignored her, an immediacy of fear for his son's well-being had arisen, and he had now abandoned finding the bat and was making his way to the opened bedroom door. Wearisome, he took a deep breath; closing his eyes momentarily in preference of his own solitude.
The air gave the impression of being heavy, smoky even, and he thrashed about within himself rather he was conscious or not. Stepping forward, indecisive to what was happening, he listened guardedly. Sleep still sat on his eyelids which had yet to properly adjust to the darkness but he saw and heard enough now to manage his way. The dog's tranquil snores faded off behind him as he stepped out into the hallway. Muffled squeaks beneath the carpet told of his progress and so he understood not to let his guard down, that the risk was too great.
His son's room was only down the hall and an impetuous itch tugged at him to lunge towards it. Yet he refrained, not wanting to lure the intruder, if there were in fact one, exactly where he didn't want him to be. Collecting himself took tremendous effort, but thinking over and over of his family's safety proved worthy. He steadied his advance and concentrated on defending what no one had the right to threaten.
The floor still squeaked below and as he inched forward the melody of winter likewise sustained it's chiming against the apartment windows. He worried for his wife, looking back to check while still shimmying ever-so quietly along the wall. He could hear her rustling around in the bed. God protect them , he thought and began a silent prayer.
Visit
this house, I beg you, Lord,
All around him the darkness flickered dreamlike as if intruded itself by another shadow moving swiftly on his heals. He spun, but saw nothing.
Stillness had resumed.
When he turned back a cold draft washed over his bare feet. He shivered, but continued forward concentrating intently on any sounds that might come from his son's room. Memories of his own childhood crashed in, and back out of his mind. He couldn't help it. They kept coming back like the tide; pouring in with each wave folding over him then sliding back to give another a turn. Before he knew it, he was drowning in the thick illusiveness of these memories, these awkward assaults on his subconscious.
One specific memory held. When he was young, he recalled his own father charging into he and his brother's bedroom late at night. When they awoke alarmed, their father only looked down at him and said in his deep voice, “Just checking on you boys, go back to sleep.” And then he left just like that. It now occurred to him that this very same thing might have been happening to his father at that time. And maybe to his father's father and so on.
I'm blowing this out of proportion , he thought, I need to relax .
It was then that a shadowed figure burst from his son's doorway bobbing back and forth like a buoy tormented by the ocean. A shockwave of sorts channeled down the hall ahead of it knocking him against the wall and to the ground. The shadow—empty, soundless, but with an immense aggression followed close behind evading his wild grasp as it passed over him. Fear suddenly tore into his chest kicking and punching as he erupted back to his feet. The short distance to his son's room stretched into a corridor of trepidation that ended with no comfort.
The room, now vacated by the flickering shadow, sat empty; yet it was the crib that mattered most and it sat emptier, with no son to cast a shadow.
He twisted back into the relentlessly extending corridor, hearing his steps below pitter patting across the floor but numb to the actual contact. He felt as if he floated with adrenaline through the apartment until the gravity of the situation returned and he plummeted horror-struck into a marsh. Yellow lights from the apartment hallway cast in through the wide open front door and suddenly, from the distance, he began to hear the excited chatter of approaching wings.
Hundreds of pairs.
The room commenced a merry-go-roundish spinning. Around and around the couch and TV swirled, the pictures of happiness were falling from focus and the ever swinging pendulum within their prized antique clock seemingly slowed to a listless stop. The vase of fake daffodil flowers, the scattered Fisher-Price toys, all around and around dizzying him with insanity. Images of black birds swooping, pecking, cawing all around riddled his mind. I've failed as a father , he thought, and a sickness tore into his stomach.
-Failed - And now they'll caw, without answer, at his son's meatless bones.
To his side moonlight shown in through the balcony door. He began sprinting towards it prior to thinking, the recollection of what it was hadn't occurred to his reasoning, fear propelled him, fatherhood propelled him. Sliding it open, with the metal on metal sounding like two dull knives sharpening, he leapt into the cold winter night, thrust his bare feet into the fluffy snow composed in its naturalistically ordained way on the balcony and blindly lunged himself off its metal railings.
He crashed to the ground with a painful thud and rolled into the bumper of a parked car. Nothing had cracked, and if it had, the hurting could wait; he had to catch the intruder. Had to . Not the police, not the neighborhood watch. HE had to.
Slipping his way through the snowfall, he scurried with a wild urgency on towards the door. The walkway inclined somewhat and rested between two thick cotton covered hedges guarding the area. On the other side of them, a mound of snow huddled undisturbed against the cold brick of the entryway. This pleased him. With it being the only way out, he thought of it as confirmation that no one had exited yet. Then, that no one, appeared. Through the thick glass, a faint darkness came from the distance increasing in size as it approached. Like a burst blood vessel beneath a thin layer of skin, it broadened, growing in size like the very poison of doom. He imagined it as if a giant almost, wholly encapsulating the thick windowpane within the door. He braced himself for the shockwave that accompanied it up in his apartment and watched as its supernatural mass smashed open the heavy door swinging it on its hinges and pouring out a foggy darkness that crashed into him, misting off into a thousand swirls of nothingness and vanishing utterly, entirely, from sight.
He didn't blink as the door swung back shut, as it clicked into place. Without his noticing, the thousand shards of glass had somehow rewound into their previous condition within the window in an anti-cause and effect sort of way. His hands shook, his temples throbbed; his mouth hung baffled, staggered by what he had just seen. What he didn't see now. Deep, heavy breaths wanted to pour out but a fear contained them; held them somewhere in the vicinity of his chest where the bashing of his frightened heart continued to punish them for their weakness.
A soft puzzled voice called down. “Anthony…Anthony?” It sounded miles away.
He turned slowly and confused, still tormented by his sudden loss. A blurry figure of a blend between white and blue stood on the frozen balcony above.
“Anthony?” It said again. “What in the world are you doing?” Flakes of snow fell ever so softly about it.
The blurriness smoothened out and he saw that it was his wife. In her arms she held their baby boy, snuggled safely with tender love in a thick blanket at her bosom. His own warmth flowed, burst out tingling right through his limbs as if he were himself wrapped cozily in the blanket with his family.
“I, I...” He started, not knowing what to say.
“You're what? Crazy? Did you really just jump off the balcony? It's 3 in the morning, just come back to bed.”
“I'm sorry. I had a weird dream, I, I thought someone had…” A relief overcame him. “Sorry. I forgot something in the car; I got it though—coming right now.”
He looked up at her. A tired groggy expression plastered her face as she cradled their child in her arms. The messy hair and the bags beneath her hazel eyes meant nothing. Radiance shined through and he smiled. Aware of his heartbeat calming, releasing his breathing which in turn began to return to normal, he continued to gaze up at the two of them.
“Well, come on, it's freezing out here.” She said as she turned back inside. He knew she wanted to ask more questions but was too tired and so he watched them go, knowing that things were indeed ok. Abnormal as they were, he thought of them, ignoring the steady flakes of snow falling on his shirtless body, ignoring the numbness of his bare feet on the iced up stairs. Bit by bit he was beginning to understand that everything that had just happened, happened merely because of a fatigued mind playing games on him in the middle of the night. He let out another deep breath.
And then his eyes twinkled. A smile rounded up his face and he crossed his arms perceptively and peered up at the night sky. He quivered a little as he starred at the enormous expanse of stars twinkling overhead. Something had occurred to him. He had chased death, or at least thought he had been, without fear of what could happen to him. He had been completely willing to place himself in harms way. This made him proud, this calmed him, reassured his fears that when the time came, he would do what was needed. A long cut from the fall burned a joyful sensation on his arm. It reminded him how he pushed the door to the side and jumped from a second story apartment without so much as looking.
Crazy? Yes.
Over the top? Absolutely.
But, ah, he thought as a profound weight lifted, nevertheless, reassurance. The greatest reassurance of all . At that moment a new feeling manifested itself.
A feeling of relief.
Of a new man.
A man who now knew without a doubt, that he's worthy of being a father. |