CRUEL KILL

Today she looked grey; even her green eyes seemed grey. Yet she wore vivid red lipstick and matching red pantyhose, a striking contrast to her relatively short, tight dress. Her hair was drastically different now, cut into a shocking blonde bob. I heard her vacuuming before I had to leave bed for school, and I wondered how she did it in those heels. Now, she was washing the dishes, the pink rubber gloves a shade lighter under the moving grey cloud hanging over her head. She turned her head and saw me sitting at the breakfast table, the cereal bowl she’d placed in front of me untouched, the flakes growing soggy in the milk. 'William,' she mouthed quietly, barely moving her lips. 'Please eat your breakfast. Quickly, come on.' Her eyes I noticed had large black lashes. Every time they blinked, it was like a black moth flapping its wings. 'William, I said, eat your cereal,' she whispered more forcefully this time, through gritted teeth, as we heard IT moving around upstairs in the bathroom. 'Look, listen to me,' she continued, pulling off the rubber gloves and placing them on the sink. She picked up a tea towel, then hesitated before walking toward me. 'We need to keep him happy, okay? We can’t do this on our own. Both of us need to try harder. I need to be a better wife, and you... you need to talk. Stop being such a miserable little shit. Get over it. If we could be better, he wouldn’t be so angry with us. And maybe… just maybe… he’ll be the lovely man who helped us so much after Dad died. Are you listening, William?' Pause. Did she say wife? ‘Billy!’ She shouted my dad’s name. We both were called William, but everyone called him the shortened version of Billy, and me, William. It was the loudest I had heard anyone say a name whilst being quiet. If that makes sense? We could hear IT coming down the stairs. She whispered, ‘Billy, don’t fuck things up AGAIN!’ The word wife still held my focus. ‘Eat your cereal now.’ I just stared at my bowl. ‘He likes you to eat before school.’ She had, wife! I looked up and quietly asked, ‘What’s happened to your hair?’ ‘You know he likes it shorter. Nobody else will love me William, I am no good to anyone. Everything’s my fault.’ Mum whispered these words before speaking one last, departing forceful whisper... ‘Billy! Eat your goddamn cereal now!’ IT flew into the kitchen. ‘What the fuck is this, you dirty little bastard?’ I looked up from the cereal bowl and saw IT standing in the doorway. All I could see were his vicious yellow wolf eyes, holding my bed sheets between his thumb and index finger. The way he was holding the sheets, it might as well of been a piece of dog shit. I didn’t know where to look, so my body just shook. ‘What has he done?’ murmured my mum, giving me a look of pure evil, ‘has he pissed the bed again?’ ‘The dirty little bastard wanked all over his sheets and just left everything stuck to it for us to clean up, hasn’t he?’ IT was pointing at the dried semen on the sheets, if he had looked closer and thought about it, he might have realised it was his own mess. ‘Oh, William, how could you?’ Funny how my mum stopped whispering now. She was shaking her head and backing away slightly from IT, creeping into the corner. You know what you do to puppies, don’t you, William? When they shit on your carpet?’ He was moving toward me with the bedsheets, and I could just make out the white stains in the cloth he held in his hand. I couldn’t move, frozen in place. ‘You rub your dog’s nose in it to stop it happening again!’ He screamed the last part and rubbed his semen into my face. The cereal bowl crashed to the floor, the contents landing on my black school trousers, mixing with my steaming urine after I had just pissed myself. ‘Billy! Look what you’ve done now, your trousers.’ I wasn’t sure how I could have answered my mum even if I had wanted to. IT was still rubbing his DNA all over my face. ‘You can’t go to school wearing them like that,’ she continued, ‘what will the school think?’