My short fiction just won first place in the Virginia Writers BLUE NIB contest and was published in the Journal of the Blue Ridge 2022. You can read it below. (Warning: the story deals with both domestic and child abuse.)

IN DARKNESS AS IN LIGHT

The morning after our mother disappeared, I watched as my father took a brown egg out of a porcelain bowl that sat out on our gray Formica counter. The egg had chicken poop on it and a tiny feather still attached. I thought he might wash it off, but he didn’t bother. He tapped one end with a bent spoon, making a small opening. Then he covered it with his fat thumb, flipped the egg and cracked a hole in the other end. He sucked out the guts from the bottom in one swoosh.

 “What you looking at, Budge?” My father stepped toward me. “Got a problem, boy?”  I didn’t lift my head. Sam shot me a side eye, signaling me to not to respond. At fourteen, my brother had three years on me. I followed his lead.

 My father lingered over me one long minute. The skin on my neck tingled, ready for a slap or a twist of my ear. But the man grunted then chased the egg with Jim Beam. He loved to day drink. He tucked bottles everywhere: in his back pocket, under a sofa cushion, in the glove compartment of his battered Ford pick-up and in the toolbox on Springfield city bus which he drove every day while Sam and I were at Truman Middle School.

I asked, “Where’s Mom?” We usually woke up to her making us eggs or pancakes.

 “Shopping.” My father spat out the words. My brother and I knew Kroger hadn’t opened yet and she only shopped on weekends.

My father stared me down, daring me to contradict him. He wore black-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick they cast gray halfmoons on his pock-marked cheeks, which were greenish white, like a frog’s belly. In bright daylight with his glasses on, he couldn’t make out whether some creature running through our backyard was a cat or a squirrel or a broken-winged bird. With vision so bad, we wondered how he could keep his job as a bus driver.

The night before I’d woken up to my drunken father screaming that my mother didn’t show him enough respect. He said he hated “the expression on her face” when he came home at night. I’d heard a crash, then nothing. The noise didn’t wake Sam. I decided against going out. More than once, my father had roughed up Sam for protecting my mother. Sam stood close in height to my father but was half his weight. As my heart raced, I listened for any other sounds. Nothing. I drifted to sleep.

Since I could remember, my father staggered home angry and drunk every night, often after Sam and I were already asleep. We’d wake to his grating voice, first baiting my mother then shouting down any response she offered, sometimes breaking furniture or hitting her.

Now, as my father left the kitchen, I spotted a new hole in the wall near the phone. He glared at us then burst out the front door, slamming it behind him. Sam and I exhaled.

“Where do you think Mom is?”

Sam said, “Maybe Aunt Krista’s? Car’s not in the driveway.” My mother’s sister lived two miles down the road, in town, in the same house she and my mother lived as kids. After my grandparents died, she stayed on. She and my mother talked on the phone every day.

I picked up my backpack. Light, no lunch in it. “She’s never….”

“Budge, maybe she’s fed up. Needed a break.”

That afternoon, we came home from school to an empty house. No car. No note. No Mom at the stove making dinner.

Sam stared at the empty kitchen. I rushed through our tiny home, making the circuit three times. Then I shouted her name into the woods behind our yard.

When I came back in, Sam stood in the front hallway, holding her jacket and purse.

 “It’s cold. She would have worn her jacket. She always has her purse.” The room spun.

“Stop flipping out!” Sam slammed his fist against the closet door. “She’s at Aunt Krista’s.”

Aunt Krista drove right over after Sam called. She burst in, her curly brown hair flying in all directions, wild as ever. Aunt Krista never stopped talking, laughing, offering her opinion. My mother, on the other hand, acted as if the universe had allotted her a finite number of words.

Even though Aunt Krista was not calm, her presence settled me. She’d find my mother. “When did you last see her?”

Of course, we had no information except that I’d heard Dad yelling the night before and a new hole in the wall. No big surprise, business as usual at our house.

Aunt Krista ordered Chinese for supper after which I did homework at the kitchen table. After living in the same town all her life and working as a real estate agent, my aunt knew everyone. Her first call was Velma, the head cashier at Kroger. No, she hadn’t seen her. Then, she phoned my grandpa’s friend who worked at the bus station. Not seen there, either. She got in touch with intake at the hospital. They gave her a hard time because of patient confidentiality, but finally a nurse said my mother hadn’t come in. Last she called her old boyfriend, Ollie, a cop. They’d dated for a couple years but broke up after Aunt Krista told him “Nothing personal, Ollie, but I’m never going to marry any man ever.” They stayed friends, getting a drink every once in a while. He must have been out because she left a message.

I tried to study for my spelling test, but each time Aunt Krista hit a dead end, I felt more panicky. Sam sat in the living room, slowly shredding the pages in his blue-lined notebook.

Around nine, Aunt Krista insisted we go to bed. “You’ve got school.”

Much later, we woke up to Aunt Krista and my father screaming.

“Where’s my sister, Leon?”

“Damned if I know. Walked out last night.”

“Where?”

“Car’s gone. Figured she ran off to you.”

“Bullshit. You know she didn’t. Where’s Vi?”

“Took off with her boyfriend.”

“I don’t believe that for a hot minute.”

“Krista, get your sorry ass out of here”

“I’m calling the police.”

“Go ahead.” My father had no fear of law enforcement. Once a month, he stayed sober enough to play poker with the police chief, a couple of officers and a judge, all former high school buddies.

“If you’ve hurt her ….”

My father’s voice boomed, loud and sinister, “Get out. You’re trespassing. I am so itching to shoot you!” The door slammed and Aunt Krista’s car engine started.

Sam muttered, “Shit, shit, shit…” from the upper bunk. I cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, two cops came by and asked Sam and me if we knew where our mother was. I said, “She’s never gone off like this.”

Sam tried to tell them, “Her purse and jacket are…” but my father interrupted, all jokey.

 “The wife and I had a little spat. Took off to cool her jets..”

Other than Aunt Krista, my mother had no friends. My father saw to that. No P.T.A, no neighbors. We never could have kids over. “A man’s home is his castle,” he’d say.

As we walked away, I could see one policeman laughing with my father, as the other halfheartedly poked around the backyard. They didn’t even come into the house.

 On the bus, I asked, “Where do you think Mom is?”

Sam shoved me. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Maybe she is taking a little vacation from Dad.”

 “Mom wouldn’t have left town without calling Aunt Krista.” Sam shook his head. “And, she would never have left us alone with him.”

I picked at a crack in the vinyl seat, pulling out bits of stuffing. “You think something bad happened?”

Sam stared out the grimy window. “Aunt Krista called the cops.”

“The cops, they were laughing with Dad this morning. They didn’t seem worried.”

Sam punched me. “Can’t you just shut up?”

That night, Sam and I made our own supper, boiled hot dogs and potato chips. My stomach felt so upset I could hardly eat.

Aunt Krista called. Hearing her voice calmed me. She asked me if we had any food in the house and if my father was home yet. Then she wanted to talk to Sam. They weren’t on a minute before my father walked in.

“Who’s that?” He hovered over Sam, one hand gripping his shoulder.

“Just Aunt Krista.”

He ripped the telephone off the wall. “Don’t talk to nobody. Especially not that bitch.”

My father had destroyed the only phone in the house, cutting us off from Aunt Krista and anyone else. The room went white on me.

But Sam screamed. “Really? You broke the phone?” When my father lunged for him, Sam ran to our room.

 I felt supper rise in my throat. I threw up, barely getting to the bathroom.

The next afternoon, after school, I spotted Aunt Krista standing by our bus. Sam came out of the building just behind me. She quickly gathered us to her, talking softly. “You okay?”

We nodded.

She paused. “Nothing from Mom?”

Sam stared at his feet. I felt tears coming to my eyes.

 “I’ve hired a lawyer to fight for custody. I’m hiring a private investigator. For now, anything goes wrong, tell the school social worker.”

That night, my father showed up drunker than usual. He half-fell into the kitchen shouting, “Damn squirrels.” He took down his loaded pistol from the top cabinet in the pantry, opened the back door then fired. I heard the shot ricochet off our rusted grill.

Sam pulled me into our bedroom. I started gasping.

My brother slapped me on the back. “Get hold of yourself.”

“What should we do?”

 “Wait.” Sam whispered. He put one arm around my shoulders and held me tight. I got my breath back. After a while, my father stopped yelling.

“Should we check on him?”

Sam said, “No. If we’re lucky, he’s choked on his own puke.”

Sam said, “Let’s sleep dressed and with our shoes on. That way we’ll be ready to run.” So, I slept with one eye open and two shoes on. In the bunk above me, Sam lay with a Little League bat by his side. He figured he could get in one good swing, stunning our father enough to give us time to escape.

Two days later, I woke up with hunger pains stabbing my gut. From the bunk above, I heard Sam’s stomach growling.  The last two nights, we hadn’t found much for supper. A couple eggs, ketchup, and a half-empty box of Pop Tarts.

Sam jumped down. “I’m going to get money off Dad for food. I want to catch him before he heads out.” We stood at the kitchen door, trying to decipher our father’s mood. Sam whispered, “Stay back in the hallway.”

As my brother edged into the kitchen, Dad downed a shot of whiskey. Keeping the table between our father and himself, my brother said, “You’re out of beer nuts. Give me a twenty and I’ll go 7-Eleven after school.”

Our father slammed the glass onto the counter. “You think I’m an ATM?” He swung around toward Sam. “Answer me!”

Sam stood his ground. “No. You’re definitely not an ATM.”

“Smartass!” Dad shook him hard. “When I was your age, I hustled, made a buck any way I could!” Even from the hall, I could see a blood vessel bulging in my father’s neck.

Dad raised his open hand to smack Sam, but he pushed back and ran out the door, gesturing for me to follow.

My father stared down the hall. “I see you.” A pause. “Get in here.”

“Now!” he shouted.

I inched forward, shaking. My father went into the cupboard, picked up the Pop Tarts, threw the box on the floor, then stomped on it. “Worthless, both of you.” He shoved me as he walked out. I heard him screeching down the road in his truck.

Just before midnight, my father kicked in the front screen door. Nothing new about that; the door barely hung on its hinges from all the battering.

My father’s yelling got louder as he staggered down the hall. “Vi, I hate you, girl!” A crash. “You made me so mad. I didn’t mean it.”

Another crash. More crying. His voice outside our door, “We’ll come to you. It’ll be quick, easy. We’ll all be together again. You, me and the boys…”

 Sam leaped down from his bunk. “Push the bed against the door.” We forced it as close as we could get.

My father pushed the door only a bit before it hit the oak bedframe. “What the hell?”

Silence. Then we heard the creak of a cabinet opening. Footsteps. Through the slim crack in the door, we saw one bloodshot eye. “You think you’re gonna disrespect me? Disrespect this!”

A gunshot. The bullet blew through the room, inches above our heads, lodging in the back wall.

Sam dragged me toward the window. “Go!” Together, we forced the sill upward then jumped a couple feet to the ground. We charged down the gravel road, into the gloom of night. Every few seconds, I’d glance back, expecting his truck to come barreling at us. But no pick-up, no cars at all. Just a dusty road and a crisp sliver of moon in black sky. My lungs burned with every breath. At the first streetlight, we paused. “Where?”

Sam shouted. “Away from him.”

I fell to my knees on the asphalt and put my head in my hands. I missed my mother. I needed her to save us.

“Stop being dramatic.” Sam kicked my leg, not hard, but enough to make me stand. “Aunt Krista’s.”

Closer to town, a police car drove past us then made a U-turn. Sam gripped my arm. “Keep your mouth shut.”

The cop walked toward us. “Why out so late, boys?”

I burst into tears.

We wound up at the police station talking to a lady they called in from home. No uniform, so probably a social worker. She told us, “My name is Ms. Aldred.” She had bed-head and kept drinking from a large cup of coffee. The woman asked us questions. Sam said nothing. I told her my mother was missing and how my Aunt Krista called the police. She interrupted me, “But why were the two of you walking into town in the middle of the night?”

I looked at Sam. He stared straight ahead.

I said, “My father came home drunk and shot into our bedroom. We jumped out the window and ran. We were on our way Aunt Krista’s.”

Ms. Aldred slammed her cup onto the table then left the room. She shouted at a policeman in the hallway. I couldn’t hear his responses but every time I heard what she said, I felt a twinge of hope.

“What’s wrong with you, Jerry?”

“I don’t give a damn you’ve known him for decades.”

 “Salt of the earth, my ass. He’s a drunk. He just shot at his kids.”

“His wife’s been missing for days. Anybody worried about that?”

 “Do your damn job! Bring him in!”

When she came back into the room, Ms. Aldred said, “Let’s call your aunt.”

The next morning, I woke up in my mom’s old bedroom in a sea of pink: tiny roses on the wallpaper, a fuchsia shag rug, a rose comforter on my twin bed and my brother wrapped in his own satin cocoon in the bed next to me. Two photos sat on the bureau, both high school graduation portraits, Aunt Krista in one, laughing hard at some joke. My mother in another, with furrowed brow, gazing beyond the photographer, looking as if she was already worried about the future.

            Within seconds, my heart galloped. Where was my father? Still loose?

            When the phone rang, I jumped out of bed and stood by the kitchen door.

Aunt Krista said, “He’s in custody? Good.” A pause. “Maybe out by Wednesday? You’re kidding. He shot at his kids.” A pause. “It did not go off by accident. Did you talk to the social worker?” A pause. “Sure. I’ll file a restraining order—and he’ll shoot us dead anyway. Yeah, same to you.”

            I walked into the kitchen. Awakened by the phone, Sam came in behind me.

            “Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell. Have some breakfast.” Aunt Krista ran her fingers through her curls. I noticed streaks of gray I hadn’t seen before.

Using a slice of toast, I broke the yolk of a fried egg, then scooped the dripping mess into my mouth, savoring the flavor of buttered toast and bacon fat. When the food hit my empty stomach, my aching belly felt better for the first time in days.

Aunt Krista said, “They have your dad in jail. Drunk and disorderly conduct. Discharging a firearm.” She filled our glasses with orange juice. “You’re going to stay here. We’ll go shopping for clothes this morning.”

Before bed, Aunt Krista handed us pajamas, brown stripes for Sam and green stripes for me. When she came to say good night, we had our new school clothes on, including our shoes. “I meant for you to wear the pajamas.”

            I kept my head low, but Sam said, “Can’t.”

            Aunt Krista sat by him on the bed. “Why?”

I said, “We got to be ready to run. We don’t know if Dad will bust in drunk.”

            Aunt Krista hugged us then put the pajamas in the top drawer of my mother’s old bureau.

            Thursday night, the phone rang. I lay in my bed reading. Sam was brushing his teeth. I could hear Aunt Krista. “Yes, this is she. How could that be? What am I supposed to do? Seriously?”

Sam and I ran to the kitchen. He said, “What?”

            Aunt Krista looked pale and shaky. “Your father’s lawyer got him out on bail an hour ago.”

Ten minutes later, we heard my father yelling out front. “Krista, give me my boys.” A gun shot. Then another one. A third pinged the window sill.

            Aunt Krista made us lie on the floor of the bathtub. Sam curled his body around mine. I could feel his heart pounding against my back, resonating with my own.

In the kitchen, Aunt Krista shouted on the phone. “Leon is shooting at my house! What the hell were you thinking?” The police came in a flash with sirens blaring, but my father had already taken off. Ollie, Aunt Krista’s ex-boyfriend, burst in. “Once we find him, you have my word, he won’t get released.”

            “You know damn well it’s up to that crooked judge.”

            Ollie sighed, “Pack. I’ll take you somewhere safe.”

             Aunt Krista pulled out two suitcases from the basement then started throwing clothes into them. Right when we were heading out, the phone rang. “What? No. Are you sure?” Aunt Krista’s voice shook. “Your father has passed away.”

            “How?” Sam looked wild-eyed.

            “Passed away? You mean dead?” How could he be dead? A man with so much power and anger. I felt a rush of relief. He’s not coming to kill us tonight. Almost as quickly, I felt shame. “It’s our fault he’s dead. We ran away.”

Aunt Krista drew me to her. “Not your fault. If you stayed, he would have killed you, too.”

Aunt Krista spared us the details; later we found out that Dad had gone to the city depot and shot himself inside the bus he drove every day. Divers found my mother’s body in her car at the bottom of a lake four miles south of us. The forensics guy and coroner directly linked my father to her death.

Those first few months, I cried myself to sleep. I woke up screaming more nights than not. Sam rolled up into himself; he’d lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

***

The months after she died, even before I opened my eyes, I’d wake, my face covered with tears, my heart wrapped in barbwire, terrible pain with every breath.

A year later, at Aunt Krista’s calm dinner table, sometimes I feel him near me. My skin prickles, my body tenses, anticipating a pinch, a slap, expecting to be jerked out of my seat.

Now, though, on some days, her death is not my first thought. Sometimes, I visit my mother’s grave to talk or more often, sit quietly. I don’t know if she can hear me, but I feel better.

I don’t wear my shoes to bed anymore.  I’ve outgrown those pajamas that still sit in my mother’s bureau drawer. A week ago, Aunt Krista bought me a new pair for my birthday. They are wrapped in a plastic package at the foot of my bed. Maybe someday I’ll be able to wear them.