Home
A kaleidoscope of colours in shapes flooded Adam’s eyes as the first punch struck his head, like a sledgehammer, he could feel his father’s knuckles crack against his skull. The contour of each digit was recognizable, an all too familiar feeling - a feeling he would describe as home.
Home was a bitter and grey place somewhere between the train tracks and the bottle store in some shitty town filled with stray dogs and drunken homeless people. It smelled like burned plastic and rotten meat. The locals were an unpleasant mixture of unemployed alcoholics, drug addicts and petty thieves, living hand to mouth on the brink of self-destruction.
Adam didn’t mix much with the kids on the block but out of pity he would converse from time to time with a boy called Alex, his father was a packer at the local supermarket and his mother stayed at home with his two younger sisters, selling cigarettes from the front door. She had badly rotten teeth but she was always friendly. The only time Adam visited their house, he was offered water from a dirty plastic cup, which rested on a beer crate, next to a tiny heap of cat shit which, by the looks of it have been there for a few days. They had no furniture, only an old television and the kids slept on the floor in the living room on some old rags that resembled something of a bed.
Adam’s parents were well off once. His father was a fireman and his mother a teacher, but his father had always been troubled and found some peace in gambling and drinking – a combination that would later be the cause of their financial ruin. His mother got ill and without proper care, cancer finally killed her.
Between the second and third punch he tried to calculate in his mind what he had done this time to deserve a beating. The ringing in his ears started right away and all attempts to rationalize the violence seemed impossible. He didn’t hate his father, despite of all the scars and bruises he was able to rise above this place, the people and circumstance. Adam lived inside his head; the only place he could be free. The only place he could be himself.
Adam would remember this day for the rest of his life because it was at the very moment, after the fourth blow that he experienced a moment of clarity. He realized the cause of his Father’s explosive rage: It was simple, so simple that he knew that his father also knew this deep set truth but could not dream to believe it. Adam knew that the violent outburst was a disease, a curse bestowed upon his father by his father and his father before him. An endless circle of fear, manifested as blind rage and the only outlet was an ultra-violent gift of a beating to his son. Adam realized this because what he saw in his father’s eyes was not a sign of possession as he would have like to believe but rather angst and fear; the kind of fear Adam knew as a child, a child’s fear.
Even though Adam’s body had received a near-fatal beating, his mind celebrated victory. He had not succumbed to fear; instead he surpassed the curse as he had done twice before. His father, not yet satisfied with the punishment bequeathed an encore of three more punches at the realization of Adam’s strength. Adam wouldn’t be broken. Adam’s spirit was the fuel that stoked his father’s rage.
As a thirteen year old boy, Adam decided that day that he would never cry again, nor would he flinch if his father raised his arm. That day he became fearless and careless; something his father would never be.
Years later his father would die of an aneurism but Adam who distanced himself from his family would miss the funeral. He would later find out about his passing through friends of friends but to everyone’s surprise the death of his father had no impact on his life.
