"I'm scared, scarred and probably irrevocably ******** up. But you're the ******** scum of the earth."
I spat the words at the dirty b*****d, a thick, white, wad of spittle flicking onto his cheek with the force of my words, and it looks like something completely different, like he's finally the cocksucker I've always thought him to be. Maybe now he'll take a shower. No one should stink like that, a smell that wafts off his body and drags itself down my throat so that I can taste it with my every breath. Cigarettes, sweat, and food, lost forever under the folds of bulbous, yellowed skin. He laughes, and I watch his jowls shake with a kind of dettached disgust; that whole 'there-but-not-there' illusion is my best friend. my eye catches on a black piece of something stuck between one of his dirty nicotine stained teeth and I stare at it in something like horror. Horror that something like this could be related to me even in the remotest sense of being a human being like myself. Homo Erectus, that's what my biology teacher would tell me to call it. If I went to her class, or any class for that matter. Class has given way to things that are more important, or most disgusting as it might be.
Besides, there's nothing erect about him, I think as a sardonic grin slides across my face, the face that refuses to see any resembelance to him when I stare at myself in a cracked mirror. No, nothing erect, he hasn't stood in about two years. And I get the filthy job of looking after him. Running for cigarettes, for greasy buckets of fried chicken everyday. The gnarled old woman at the take-out always marvels at my ability to eat so much chicken and stay as skinny, or runty like she really thinks, as I do. My ability, my ******** ability. I dont touch the things, except to bring them before this monstrosity before me and watch with some sick fascination as the grease slides down his tremendous face onto his stained wife-beater. A wife-beater for a wife-beater, my mother used to joke in those rare moments when his snores seemed almost like background noise and we would hold each other while he couldn't see, forcing our sorrows to become laughter, because if we didn't laugh, the tears would never end. Not so much of a wife-beater now, he could make nothing more than angry swipes at us, leaning forward on those fat stumps that he sometimes called his legs. My mother had long since left anyway, now that he couldn't chase after her. She didn't take me with her, and the smashed furniture in my bedroom and holes where my fist connected with my unpainted walls are the only witness to my forever unanswered questions of why.
His words are muffled by yards of fat, as he asks me exactly what makes me think I'm anything better than the same scum he is. No job, no friends, no ******** life. Scum, just like him. And he takes a bitter delight in it, thinking that he's rubbed off, slithered between my skin so I'll one day become him too. He doesn't know anything about nights I've snuck off to the abandoned buildings where we would bootleg cheap alcohol, that tasted sweet like freedom even in its horrible bitterness and where we danced and ******** and fought. Me and the others made our own little crucible of what we thought a teenage world should be. We fought with more furosity, seeing walls that held us back instead of the bloody faces beneath our fists. We loved harder, frantically shoving down our pants in dark corners, silent but for the slapping of flesh against flesh and then the always cold sound of metal against metal when we did up studded belts. And we lived faster, injecting, snorting and smoking what we could get our hands on, ******** consequences. We welcomed consequences, loved every minute there was pain and upset. Pain reminds you that you're alive, that you're still up and running against the metal machine that grinds your teenage heart and soul into a cold block of ice that sit behind desks day after day talking about when you were young. He doesn't, couldn't know about that. Nights when I would steal his ever precious bottles of bourbon, not even to drink (vodka got you drunk faster), but to smash against brick walls with all the rage he never saw.
I think ******** you, and then, remembering the packed duffel bag that lies across my unmade bed, say it outoud. I say it once, and then scream it, scream the years of hate-filled rhetoric that I've whispered to myself at night for years on the promise that I'd say it to his dirty face one day. ******** you for the years when you came home drunk. ******** you for the years of teachers looking at me with pity in their eyes. ******** you for not having enough money for shoes some years, but always having enough to make me go buy you cartons of Marlboroughs. I run, fearing I'll lose the nerve if I walk, pick up my duffel bag and grab my bus ticket off the scarred wood of what passes for a bedside table these days. He see's them and his squinting eyes recognize the determination in my face. He stutters, trying to push himself off the couch that has moulded itself to his body long ago, whining in a voice that suddenly sounds pathetic to me that I cant leave, who'll take care of him.
I'm not listening, I'm walking out the door. Then, just before I hit the dirt, I turn. Can I leave? My nerve is failing, faltering to a stop as I realise the finality of what I want to do. I step back in through the door, the fight mostly gone from me, and he laughes. The b*****d laughes in my face and tells me he knew I was too p***y, and to go get him some chicken. That seals it. I turn back, out the door and into the blistering sunset. His voice is growing louder, following me as I walk, and then run, and finally sprint away from him. When I'm far enough that he'll barely be able to hear me I come to a dead stop, dirt clouding over already ruined shoes. I turn calmy around, and scream as loud as I can.
Get your own damn chicken.
Scars and Stories Community Member 
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