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impertinences) wrote2018-08-08 11:12 pm
impertinences) wrote2018-08-08 11:12 pm
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Sooooo, Haven has been on my mind lately. Probably due to the copious amount of Lady Gaga I've been listening to while driving around in this Virginia heat. I'm glad I followed my gut and decided to write with the siblings.
Originally, I was going to do the first half from Luke's POV and then write a second half with a different scene from Haven's POV that thematically connected, but ... I didn't want to push my luck. I'm happy with how this came out.
Thanks to my muffinpants for being encouraging and for finding a suitable quote for me to snag!
“... you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.” - Jacques Derrida
It is August, and the heat is suffocating. The heat is a swamp, fecal-smelling and moist, choking up everyone’s throats and clinging to their skin. It’s the doldrums of summer. In two years your father will be up in Juniper Hills, a state prison hiding behind a name better suited for a retirement home, and you’ll be so acquainted with your own sin that you’ll have trouble ever remembering a time where guilt used to hit you like a punch to the gut. No, the guilt will fade to a slow burn or a soft itch, as inconsequential and harmless as a bothersome fly hovering over your lunch of salty fries and a greasy burger, but you will still question.
Here, now, your worst fear has yet to be faced. You avoid it, but you might as well try avoiding your shadow for all the good it does.
You don’t know much about the nature of sickness, but you think you’ve got something inside of you that is twisted and rotten. That doesn’t bother you nearly as much as the idea that you might be infectious. You’re two years older than your sister, which means that at seventeen you are and always have been more experienced - in handling your father’s fits and absences, in learning how to con, in dodging the police. You were running through the backwoods like a jackal by the age of seven, pocketing watches and wallets off the bus at nine, and learning how to count cards by twelve. But being the eldest also, by mere definition, means you were first. Patient zero, so to speak.
So you worry that dope-sick ache in your chest spread like a plague. A contagion. That your blue-eyed, honey-haired sister with her cherabuc grin and sticky-kid fingers found you catching and bore your disease from a young age, the way toddlers spread and bore chickenpox. Just as easy. Far more permanent. When did it happen, you used to ask yourself. At what age did you stop seeing her the way other brothers must surely see their sisters? Were you destined from birth to be catachismally fucked, or did your sickness develop? Was it the result of some Freudian sense of abandonment after your mother left? Or had you merely always wanted what you couldn’t have, a knack surely passed down from your father’s side?
The other option, you know, is that Haven is the carrier - the focal point for this disease. She could have been born as knotted and cruel as barbed wire; when she caught you, she held you until you dissolved, until your skin shred away, until your bones turned to dust, until the only things left were your longing and your will, emotions so palpable that you saw them in shades of red.
You aren’t sure which option is worse, but the man in you wants to shoulder the burden, wants to take the blame. It’s somehow easier than seeing Haven as capable of such keen cunning and manipulation, of being wily even at four.
Now, she’s fifteen, and you’re not naive enough to think her a virgin - she’s too aware of her body, too confident in slinky tops that gape open and show how she’s forgotten to wear a bra, too skilled at sucking the ends of her hair and catching her bottom lip between her teeth. She rarely drops her eyes whenever she finds you looking. It’s disarming. But when her bray of a laugh becomes snorts, when she saves you the last bowl of Lucky Charms, when she asks for help on her Algebra homework, or when she falls asleep on the couch with her feet tucked innocently into your lap, you have a hard time believing that she’s anything but guileless. She flashes you smiles that burn like sunbeams, and you know you’re the one whose fucked.
And yet …
And yet, it’s summer, the heat weighing in on you, the skies threatening thunder but not a drop of rain. It’s summer, and you’re sneaking in to your cinder block home, trying to avoid your father (his regular Sunday hangover makes him as short tempered as a hornet), when muted noise from the living room makes you freeze. You smell like beer and stale cigarettes and sweat, your t-shirt stained under the arms from your walk home from Jaime Holster’s through the woods, and the buzzing that goes off between your eyes tells you to make a dash for the hall. Your room is the first off the right, and you can duck into it and close the door and sink into your bed without so much as disturbing the dust on the blinds, but you haven’t seen Haven since she disappeared from Holster’s with another one of Bellville High’s degenerates, so you have to see, you have to be sure she made it home. She’s always been your responsibility.
You lean your head out of the kitchen.
Your father is in his regular Sunday position in his La-Z-Boy, a bottle of Bud sweating in one hand, a Marlboro Red burning in the other. The ashtray to his right overflows with butts and smoke hangs in the air. You can see the back of his head, a head still full of grey-peppered hair at fifty, and you can tell by the stoop of his shoulders that he’s awake, watching the pre-game broadcast on the family’s lone television. It’s Haven that’s confusing you, jumbling your senses.
She’s sitting on your father’s lap, her hair in a high ponytail that brushes over his left shoulder, her back flush to his chest. You’ve seen her be affectionate with him before, kissing his grizzled cheek goodnight or curling against his side to share a beer after dinner on the couch, but this is different. You think you see the recliner rock. You think you see her long legs stretch and curl, like she’s bracing her weight on the balls of her feet, moving with the recliner’s slow lazy motion. With the haze of cigarette smoke in the air and the drawn blinds blocking the harsh sun, the living room is murky, thick like the summer heat outside, but you think her hands are clutching at your father’s forearm, that he’s curled one of those muscled, tattooed arms around her waist and is keeping her against him, holding her with her ass against his groin, and when she sighs, he whispers something against her neck, below her ear, and the recliner creaks again. You can practically see it: the bulge beneath his Levis, her thighs spread wide atop his, her cut-off shorts tight against the cleft between her legs, that spot she keeps grinding back and forth against her father’s hard-on with patient, persistent rocks.
Your throat is dry. You feel sick. Your head swims with your own hangover and a cloying fear that fills your stomach with cold dread.
You make a noise. Your fist is in your mouth.
Haven turns her head, ponytail flashing like a whip, the long strands cutting across Sam Elders’ face. Her face is bright with a smile, but it crumbles when she sees you standing in the doorway. “Jesus, Luke, you’re sweating bullets. What’s wrong? Did Holster lace his weed again?”
Sam huffs a laugh. He cranes his head back to look at you, his oldest child, pale as a sheet. “Cat got your tongue?” When you still don’t say anything, frozen with your dread steadily mounting into fury, he mutes the TV, twisting the recliner around.
You suck air in through your teeth. Haven is perched between your father’s legs, her slim frame barely fitting on the leather cushion, but she isn’t on his lap at all, just in front of it. Sam still has his beer in one hand, resting innocently on the arm of the chair, and he’s crushing out his Red in the ashtray as he scrutinizes you.
“... What are you two doing?” You want the question to sound nonchalant, but you can tell by the way Haven cocks her head to the left that you didn’t quite manage it. She smirks at you, and there’s something in the caustic flip of her mouth that punches the air right out of you all over again. It’s the smirk she gives you when she thinks she’s caught you, when she seems to know something that even you haven’t quite figured out.
“I was telling daddy about Holster’s party. Waiting on the game.”
“Grab me another beer,” Sam says, patting Haven on her back.
She obliges him, as she tends to, and bumps your shoulder as she heads into the kitchen. “You sure that weed wasn’t laced?”
You mumble something about being tired and escape into the hall. Your father has already turned back to the TV, and you can hear Haven crack the top off the bottle of Bud before you flee into your room, closing the door behind you too loudly. She says something to him, some bit of noise that’s muddled by the time it reaches you, and you hear Sam laugh in response.
You still feel sick to your stomach. You don’t know what’s wrong with you, why you saw what you did, why you were so willing to believe what you thought was happening, why you, somehow, didn’t feel surprised but sickeningly relieved, like a curtain had finally been pulled back and you were being allowed to see a secret, a truth that had long been denied to you. It’s her, her, her. Not you. She’s to blame, and she knows. She’s reveling in it while you pump into your fist night after night, agonizing over how the scent of her perfume is all it takes to give you an erection, cursing into your sweaty sheets then feeling dull and empty once you’ve spilled into your hand.
Falling into your bed, you try not to think about the nature of desire, how it swells and crashes and sickens.
You’ll get drunk at Holster’s again in a week, only then Haven will come home with you. She’ll get you into bed and she’ll wrap herself around you in all the ways a woman can wrap herself around a man and you’ll hate yourself in the morning, you’ll take all the blame, but by the time Sam Elders is in Juniper Hills, you’ll have learned to share the weight of it. You’ll meet Haven halfway.
You’ll find out how good sickness tastes.
Originally, I was going to do the first half from Luke's POV and then write a second half with a different scene from Haven's POV that thematically connected, but ... I didn't want to push my luck. I'm happy with how this came out.
Thanks to my muffinpants for being encouraging and for finding a suitable quote for me to snag!
“... you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.” - Jacques Derrida
It is August, and the heat is suffocating. The heat is a swamp, fecal-smelling and moist, choking up everyone’s throats and clinging to their skin. It’s the doldrums of summer. In two years your father will be up in Juniper Hills, a state prison hiding behind a name better suited for a retirement home, and you’ll be so acquainted with your own sin that you’ll have trouble ever remembering a time where guilt used to hit you like a punch to the gut. No, the guilt will fade to a slow burn or a soft itch, as inconsequential and harmless as a bothersome fly hovering over your lunch of salty fries and a greasy burger, but you will still question.
Here, now, your worst fear has yet to be faced. You avoid it, but you might as well try avoiding your shadow for all the good it does.
You don’t know much about the nature of sickness, but you think you’ve got something inside of you that is twisted and rotten. That doesn’t bother you nearly as much as the idea that you might be infectious. You’re two years older than your sister, which means that at seventeen you are and always have been more experienced - in handling your father’s fits and absences, in learning how to con, in dodging the police. You were running through the backwoods like a jackal by the age of seven, pocketing watches and wallets off the bus at nine, and learning how to count cards by twelve. But being the eldest also, by mere definition, means you were first. Patient zero, so to speak.
So you worry that dope-sick ache in your chest spread like a plague. A contagion. That your blue-eyed, honey-haired sister with her cherabuc grin and sticky-kid fingers found you catching and bore your disease from a young age, the way toddlers spread and bore chickenpox. Just as easy. Far more permanent. When did it happen, you used to ask yourself. At what age did you stop seeing her the way other brothers must surely see their sisters? Were you destined from birth to be catachismally fucked, or did your sickness develop? Was it the result of some Freudian sense of abandonment after your mother left? Or had you merely always wanted what you couldn’t have, a knack surely passed down from your father’s side?
The other option, you know, is that Haven is the carrier - the focal point for this disease. She could have been born as knotted and cruel as barbed wire; when she caught you, she held you until you dissolved, until your skin shred away, until your bones turned to dust, until the only things left were your longing and your will, emotions so palpable that you saw them in shades of red.
You aren’t sure which option is worse, but the man in you wants to shoulder the burden, wants to take the blame. It’s somehow easier than seeing Haven as capable of such keen cunning and manipulation, of being wily even at four.
Now, she’s fifteen, and you’re not naive enough to think her a virgin - she’s too aware of her body, too confident in slinky tops that gape open and show how she’s forgotten to wear a bra, too skilled at sucking the ends of her hair and catching her bottom lip between her teeth. She rarely drops her eyes whenever she finds you looking. It’s disarming. But when her bray of a laugh becomes snorts, when she saves you the last bowl of Lucky Charms, when she asks for help on her Algebra homework, or when she falls asleep on the couch with her feet tucked innocently into your lap, you have a hard time believing that she’s anything but guileless. She flashes you smiles that burn like sunbeams, and you know you’re the one whose fucked.
And yet …
And yet, it’s summer, the heat weighing in on you, the skies threatening thunder but not a drop of rain. It’s summer, and you’re sneaking in to your cinder block home, trying to avoid your father (his regular Sunday hangover makes him as short tempered as a hornet), when muted noise from the living room makes you freeze. You smell like beer and stale cigarettes and sweat, your t-shirt stained under the arms from your walk home from Jaime Holster’s through the woods, and the buzzing that goes off between your eyes tells you to make a dash for the hall. Your room is the first off the right, and you can duck into it and close the door and sink into your bed without so much as disturbing the dust on the blinds, but you haven’t seen Haven since she disappeared from Holster’s with another one of Bellville High’s degenerates, so you have to see, you have to be sure she made it home. She’s always been your responsibility.
You lean your head out of the kitchen.
Your father is in his regular Sunday position in his La-Z-Boy, a bottle of Bud sweating in one hand, a Marlboro Red burning in the other. The ashtray to his right overflows with butts and smoke hangs in the air. You can see the back of his head, a head still full of grey-peppered hair at fifty, and you can tell by the stoop of his shoulders that he’s awake, watching the pre-game broadcast on the family’s lone television. It’s Haven that’s confusing you, jumbling your senses.
She’s sitting on your father’s lap, her hair in a high ponytail that brushes over his left shoulder, her back flush to his chest. You’ve seen her be affectionate with him before, kissing his grizzled cheek goodnight or curling against his side to share a beer after dinner on the couch, but this is different. You think you see the recliner rock. You think you see her long legs stretch and curl, like she’s bracing her weight on the balls of her feet, moving with the recliner’s slow lazy motion. With the haze of cigarette smoke in the air and the drawn blinds blocking the harsh sun, the living room is murky, thick like the summer heat outside, but you think her hands are clutching at your father’s forearm, that he’s curled one of those muscled, tattooed arms around her waist and is keeping her against him, holding her with her ass against his groin, and when she sighs, he whispers something against her neck, below her ear, and the recliner creaks again. You can practically see it: the bulge beneath his Levis, her thighs spread wide atop his, her cut-off shorts tight against the cleft between her legs, that spot she keeps grinding back and forth against her father’s hard-on with patient, persistent rocks.
Your throat is dry. You feel sick. Your head swims with your own hangover and a cloying fear that fills your stomach with cold dread.
You make a noise. Your fist is in your mouth.
Haven turns her head, ponytail flashing like a whip, the long strands cutting across Sam Elders’ face. Her face is bright with a smile, but it crumbles when she sees you standing in the doorway. “Jesus, Luke, you’re sweating bullets. What’s wrong? Did Holster lace his weed again?”
Sam huffs a laugh. He cranes his head back to look at you, his oldest child, pale as a sheet. “Cat got your tongue?” When you still don’t say anything, frozen with your dread steadily mounting into fury, he mutes the TV, twisting the recliner around.
You suck air in through your teeth. Haven is perched between your father’s legs, her slim frame barely fitting on the leather cushion, but she isn’t on his lap at all, just in front of it. Sam still has his beer in one hand, resting innocently on the arm of the chair, and he’s crushing out his Red in the ashtray as he scrutinizes you.
“... What are you two doing?” You want the question to sound nonchalant, but you can tell by the way Haven cocks her head to the left that you didn’t quite manage it. She smirks at you, and there’s something in the caustic flip of her mouth that punches the air right out of you all over again. It’s the smirk she gives you when she thinks she’s caught you, when she seems to know something that even you haven’t quite figured out.
“I was telling daddy about Holster’s party. Waiting on the game.”
“Grab me another beer,” Sam says, patting Haven on her back.
She obliges him, as she tends to, and bumps your shoulder as she heads into the kitchen. “You sure that weed wasn’t laced?”
You mumble something about being tired and escape into the hall. Your father has already turned back to the TV, and you can hear Haven crack the top off the bottle of Bud before you flee into your room, closing the door behind you too loudly. She says something to him, some bit of noise that’s muddled by the time it reaches you, and you hear Sam laugh in response.
You still feel sick to your stomach. You don’t know what’s wrong with you, why you saw what you did, why you were so willing to believe what you thought was happening, why you, somehow, didn’t feel surprised but sickeningly relieved, like a curtain had finally been pulled back and you were being allowed to see a secret, a truth that had long been denied to you. It’s her, her, her. Not you. She’s to blame, and she knows. She’s reveling in it while you pump into your fist night after night, agonizing over how the scent of her perfume is all it takes to give you an erection, cursing into your sweaty sheets then feeling dull and empty once you’ve spilled into your hand.
Falling into your bed, you try not to think about the nature of desire, how it swells and crashes and sickens.
You’ll get drunk at Holster’s again in a week, only then Haven will come home with you. She’ll get you into bed and she’ll wrap herself around you in all the ways a woman can wrap herself around a man and you’ll hate yourself in the morning, you’ll take all the blame, but by the time Sam Elders is in Juniper Hills, you’ll have learned to share the weight of it. You’ll meet Haven halfway.
You’ll find out how good sickness tastes.