Tyler Knight

“–so just let me out right here, I didn’t come home to deal with this shit!” I say.

We rumble and bump our way in a station wagon that rolled off the assembly line back in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini’s two-hour gas lines.

We drive. Angry pebbles skip and crash along the length of the wagon’s undercarriage, some are kicked up from the wheels and sent flying in our wake. Dense walls of the Pine Barren’s conifered spires on either side of the car endeavor to touch the infinite night sky.

He tests the upper limits of human reflexes on the turns. Our searching headlights fall on the trees ahead of us filling up the windshield, my fingernails dig into the door handle, and a twist of road revealed at the last moment slams me into the passenger-side door as the pitch-pines whip past my ear. The fire in my lungs reminds me to exhale.

Navigating moment to moment, more through feel than sight, he threads the car along what was once a trail for the Lenni Lenape hunting parties. No road-side lights. Kafka on my lap, I could read by the starlight.

He stamps on the brakes sending us into a wheel-locked skid on the loose gravel and I’m vaulted face-first into the dashboard. Eyes sting. My labor to draw air through my nose rewards me with serrated flint-shards of bitter pain against my nasal nerves.

Then punches come. I never see them, I know their direction by where they land on my skull. Backwards punches and downwards strikes and then the elbows that like to come across.

I’m aware that my eyelids have weight and it doesn’t seem worth the effort to keep ‘em up. He grabs the front of my pants, squeezes, yanks me out of the foggy stupor by my balls and twist-drags me back into our father-son moment.

I wail, black out, and come-to again to the tangy pain of another healthy twist.

My shaky hand reaches down for his squeezing fist, I isolate one finger, pull it to me and it pops like a stepped on crayon. Despite my whistling pain, I manage to focus on another finger and decades later he releases his grip.

Capitalizing on the sliver of reprieve, I tumble out of the car and collapse onto the cool dirt road. The sandy road-grit gathers thick and dry in my open, wheezing mouth. He’s already there. Waiting.

He reaches into my pocket with his good hand, takes my keys and wallet, and turns to leave me where I lay.

When he turns to leave I summon all my strength, hop on his back and sink in a rear-naked choke. The old man collapses to his knees but he is not done with me. He reaches back and pushes a jagged finger through my eye. My eye flashes white on contact then goes black but I don’t dare let go. I can’t. To let go is to welcome the End. Instead I squeeze. I squeeze and I pray to Christ for the strength to squeeze some more. The old man goes limp but I still don’t let go.

An Arctic wind gusts down the road and blasts into my face, forcing me to squint my eyes though only eye worth shielding.

I relax my grip, convincing myself the only reason I let go is I’m afraid that I actually got what I wanted and took another persons life, and it’s as simple as that. Sure it is. I love my father and what I don’t like about him I hate in myself. He laid out the best template of how to be a man that he knew how and I pissed all over it.

I look into my arms.

Instead of my father in my grasp, I’m holding a beautiful baby boy whose face looks like mine. The child is looking up at me. Stoic.

We sit. I stare at the child as the sun rises, and the blues and the greys melt into reds and yellows and I see my dad once again. The baby’s weight increases to the point of unbearable as the sun gains height in the sky.

I place the child in the front seat of the car. I shut the door.

And I walk.

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Tagged: Dream