Sullivan Grey

Reagan Grey was drunk and sprawled on the floor. Again. For the 11th time that week.

Alcohol bottles littered the small parlour coffee table. Dusty cigarette trays abandoned on the rug gave it a new tint.

The radio was still on and raving about the second intercountry match of the century.

To Sullivan, this was his life. This was his normal.

This was how the world should be; children are meant to take care of their parents.

Even when their parents were completely blacked out and adorned in their own vomit.

The sixteen-year-old breathed in the cold Old Virginian air from the only oxygen source in the house.

He turned around to face his father, or rather his father’s unmoving body, wondering what to do with him at that point.

Children are meant to take care of their parents at a point in their lives, agreed.

But for Sullivan, he’s been a parent much longer than he has been a child.

From the moment he could enunciate the word ‘beer’ with clarity, he became the glorified errand boy of his father.

He would wash and clean and cook. He scratched so many lottery cards that his fingernails and the ash from the cards couldn’t be told apart.

As he grew up, he was famous around town, for being the devoted son who was always there to pick up his father from the gutters after each failed gambling attempt.

And he did all these and more, all to gain his father’s forgiveness and love, maybe one day.

Which was why all he could do that night was to kneel beside his father’s wasted figure and brush his hairs from his face.

He touched his father’s cheek, it was warm. Then his neck, he was still alive.

The disappointment that riveted through him brought warmth to his cheeks.

How shameful that he wanted his father gone for good.

As remediation for his shameful thought, he walked briskly to the make-shift kitchen at the right corner of the room, and took some cool water from the bucket and a cotton rag.

He knelt down beside his father again with all but a humph.

Twisting and squeezing the rag, he wiped his father clean of his vomit, as he also wiped his mind clean of his inhumane thoughts.

“Pa, you need to wake up,” he whispered in his inherent Southern drawl, tapping his father ever so slightly on his shoulder.

“Pa, come get some rest in ya’room.” He tapped again, slightly harder than the first.

His first thought was to leave him there and go rest, but remembering the hot slaps he got on his back the last time that he made such a mistake to not get his father to bed, made him trash the thought immediately.

“Pa, please wake up. You’ve got to get to bed,” the boy said with more frustration this time and a more intense tapping.

The man grunted and stirred but didn’t open his eyes.

Fed up, Sullivan kept on tapping, repeating Pa, tapping and tapping, losing reality of the monster, his father, rearing to consciousness.

“You beat me, boy?” said his Viking of a father.

And truly, he resembled a Viking. Long beard that could wrap around your throat, red eyes that seemed to see the world through red-rimmed anger and pain, and the signature scar across his right eye gotten from a fight with Butscar, over a 100 dollar bill they both came about.

Butscar definitely wasn’t merciful. Taking up broken glass, he seared his skin with the bottle and celebrated his victorious 100-dollar bill. Leaving Reagan to cry out as hot blood poured from his face and eye socket.

Sullivan had thought his father would die that day, if anything, he was just a tad bit hopeful. But his father was very much alive, and trying to choke him to death with his hairy mane of a hand wrapped around his malnourished throat.

While Butscar was found on the street the following week, having lost the money in a failed gambling process, looking for the next unlucky victim to pilfer from.

Sullivan scratched and yelped. His face becoming as red as his hair, then slowly turning purple.

“Pa, please,” was all he could screech out for the mad man to remember it was his son.

He dropped his hand from the boy’s throat and stood up, staggering unstable and pointing a finger at him.

“Ya’think you’ve got power, boy? You’ve got to kill me first to break free from me,” he slurred out and laughed maniacally to his room hidden in the corner.

Sullivan scratched at his throat, bewildered. Not at the fact that his father tried to kill him – that wasn’t the first time – but by the fact that he put it straight to him that his hatred for him was eternal.

Normally he would imply it, but Sullivan knew for sure that his father wouldn’t rest until he sent him to the exact place Sullivan had sent his mother.

I’ll leave you to guess where.