Dying Light

Chapter 4

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Photo by Javy Luzania on Unsplash

1

In the hospital he couldn’t sleep. The pain was constant and searing, something that he had never experienced before. He moaned, made to roll over, then was shocked into stillness by the pain any movement caused. 

Every now and then, a nurse’s shuffling feet would slow and stop outside his door. Then a head would appear, haloed in blue hallway light, a shadow for a face. She might breathe in or whisper, the weight of her pity pulling her shoulders down. Then, the feet would shuffle away again, and she would be gone.

His mama had left in the early hours, headed home to sleep.

“I’ll be back bright and early James.”

That left him there with his thoughts. All of them centered on Bill. As bad as the burns were, he knew that Billy had finally done it. There was no way he would get away with something this bad. Mama and daddy would finally see him for what he was. Hank wouldn’t be friends with him anymore either. He had gone too far.

It was like James had been rescued in a strange way. Lifted out of the guaranteed life of violence and fear he would have to endure. Hell, maybe Bill would even be sent away. Maybe to jail. You couldn’t go around burning kids and get away with it. 

Mama had brought him comic books, notebooks, markers and crayons to color with. The only problem was he couldn’t hold anything himself. The wounds under his arms were wrapped, the gauze there changed four or five times a day. Once he had asked for a mirror to see what hurt so bad, but they said no, that kind of thing wasn’t allowed. 

He had exercises to do, and they taught him so he could copy when he got back home. 

“The skin has to stretch. Otherwise it will stay stiff and make it hard for you to move it right.”

His physical therapist would explain this to him as he held his breath, holding back tears as he lifted his arms up. The skin under his armpits pulled. It felt so tight he thought it would rip. 

“Good,” the guy would say just when James was on the verge of passing out. 

He would let him rest, wait for his face to go pale and milky. The sweat would turn cold against his face. And then the dreaded words would come.

“Again.”

2

He was only in the hospital for three days, but the stay felt like an eternity. Mama had barely left his side, returning home at night to sleep before showing up first thing in the morning again. James was drunk on the attention. 

Never in his life had his mother spent this amount of time doting on him, caring for him. She had left parts of that to his older brothers. Now she seemed to take a keen interest in his wellbeing, bringing special homemade meals from home so that he wouldn’t have to eat mushy hospital food, filling his bedside table with books and comics. Granted, they weren’t the ones he really liked, but he read them anyway.

His arms wouldn’t raise the way they used to. Not yet. But he had developed a system of sorts. If he propped his legs up and raised the bed back so he was sitting up, he could balance them there and use the tips of his fingers to flip the pages. 

The morning that he left, mama arrived at the hospital with a change of clothes and a present. It was in a gift bag, a blue one, with bits of red tissue paper poking jaggedly out of the top. 

“I saw it in the gift shop and thought you would like it,” she said to him, her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.

She set it on his lap, the paper of the comic book crinkling and folding as she did. It was Marvel, one of his only ones. He watched as The Hulk’s face smashed and deformed in front of him. 

“Go ahead. Open it.”

He tried to lift his arm up, but the gift bag was too tall. He only made it a few inches above the bottom. 

“Come on James. I know it hurts, but you’ve got to try.”

He looked at her and saw that her eyes were even bigger than before. A smile was plastered across her face, but there was something beneath it. He watched her, waiting for the something to reveal itself, but she stayed like that until his stomach started to knot and the hair on the back of his neck started to prickle. 

“Open it James. Come on now!”

He reached again, but still couldn’t even get his arm to halfway up the height of the bag before the searing pain under his arms started up again. He groaned, then shook his right leg a little until the bag fell. 

“James,” she drew the “a” of his name out long, and clucked her tongue once. “Honey that’s cheating.”

He looked up at her, confused. She leaned over, sighing with the effort, and stood the bag back up. 

“Okay, let’s try again.”

Her smile had widened, her eyes still glittering and fixed on the bright blue of the bag. 

“Do it James!” 

She was giggling. 

“Do it honey!”

She clapped her hands.

He tried with his left, the pain in his right still simmering on the verge of making him nauseous. It rose, but only two inches before his eyes were brimming with tears. He kept going, sweat breaking out on his forehead now as he reached for the top of the bag. The pain was a crescendo. His skin felt like it was tearing, pulling deep into the connective tissue between his shoulder and torso, rippling down his rib cage. 

And then, he couldn’t take it anymore. He cried out and dropped his arm onto the bed, rolling onto his side in pain. The bag toppled over and onto the ground, the contents spilling out, the red paper like squares of hot blood around it. 

“Oh James, look what you’ve done!” his mother cried.

He glanced over, breathing hard with the effort. He could see that it was a stuffed animal filled with little beads that make the toy heavy and malleable in your hands.

His mother went around the side of the bed, her hip ramming into the rail on one side as she headed toward the spilled gift bag. She waited a moment, her eyes closed, her hand pressed to her right hip. When she recovered, she walked to it and bent over breathlessly. She was gathering things up, setting them right.

A moment later she popped back up with the bag and tissue paper clutched in one hand and the little stuffed animal in the other. Its eyes were black balls, oversized and glinting in the bright hospital lights. 

“Well since you spoiled the surprise I’ll let you see him.”

It was a guinea pig, dark brown with spots of lighter brown and white. A light tuft of hair came out at the top, making the thing comical, unbelievable. 

“Doesn’t it look just like Harvey?”

She was smiling so big when she said it, James thought her whole jaw would open up, unhinge right there, spill her tongue out lazily onto her chin and chest. Hang and grow longer, pulled down by gravity until it touched the floor. 

He nodded, said yes even though he didn’t like it. Not the real Harvey at home or the stuffed version here. He never liked rodents.

“But this one doesn’t have a tail,” his mother had protested when Bill brought Harvey home four years before. 

It didn’t matter to James. He didn’t like the way their noses moved, always sniffing like they were about to bite. And their teeth, two big ones in the front, as long as a finger and yellowed. Bill saw his disgust with the thing and chased him with it, his family laughing until they were on the verge of tears before finally telling Bill to stop. To leave him alone. 

“Well, even though you know what it is, that doesn’t change things.”

His brow furrowed, unsure of what she meant. He was waiting for her to plop the ugly thing on his tummy. He didn’t like it, but he would pretend to, then nudge his comic book over, rest it on the thing’s stupid face so that he couldn’t see it. But mama wasn’t going to do that. 

She put it back in the bag, placing the red tissue paper on top, tucking it here and there so that he couldn’t see it anymore. Then, she smiled at him, placed it back on his stomach, and walked back around to the chair she had been sitting in. 

He looked at it, not understanding what she expected. Not wanting to understand. Then, the smile left her, and she looked at him and said the dreaded word. 

“Again.”

3

Skye thought about that night often, when he made the little cross for Harvey. Bill was terribly upset, but not about Harvey. He didn’t even know yet. He had been sitting in his room working at it, painting the wood of the cross white, newspaper stretched out along his desk and hanging lazy over the edges in the shadow brought by the harsh focused light of his desk lamp.

He was hunched over, his eyes close and attentive, making sure the paint spread evenly when it dried. He caught a drip on the side and smoothed away on the upstroke of his paint brush. He had already carved it with his pocket knife. The thing was dull, but the lettering had turned out pretty good anyways. 

He set the brush to the side, admiring the smooth white reflection in the light. The two thin boards were laying next to each other, one long and sleek and the other shorter and broader. He could make out his message, but just barely. The paint was glopping up inside the lettering, making the characters soft and unreadable. 

Outside of his room he could hear Bill. Every once in a while, his voice would hum into focus. Hank was with him too, his quiet responses almost muted by the closed door and the walls that separated them. James sat up and listened. He thought he knew why Bill was angry. The reason was sitting on his desk.

It was a spool of golden wire. Bill was in an art class. He didn’t usually care about things like that, but his teacher was the young and beautiful Mrs. Frederick, and Bill inexplicably had decided that not only did he love art, but he himself might want to be an artist when he grew up. His second semester of his freshman year, he had signed up for her sculpture class. He needed the wire to finish his project.

James took the spool in his hands, felt the cool metal wrapped tight around the cylinder. Before the bath, Bill would have come charging in here. Demanded that James fess up. And before the bath, James wouldn’t have known what Bill was talking about. He would never have stolen anything from Bill, not even a spare mustache hair off the bathroom sink. But this was after. 

James’ skin was healing, and pretty well. The doctors credited his mother’s ambitious therapy sessions with his recovery.

“And with such creativity!” one doctor remarked, his tone dripping with exuberance.

He would not lose any mobility in his arms, though the scarring beneath his armpits and under his neck would be permanent. They were doing things with lasers. Developing treatments that might make the scarring less visible. James’ mother had clapped her hands at that. 

 “Do you hear that? No one is even going to know!”

That wasn’t what he said, but it was what she heard. The main focus of all her energies since he came home. No one is going to know. But it wasn’t just his looks that she was worried about. No, not that primarily at all. It was Bill. After the bath, the police had questioned him. He was the only one in the room. What, exactly, had happened?

If she could make James better, make what happened to him smaller, she could help Bill stay out of trouble. Not legal trouble mind you. The whole thing had been an accident. She had assured them. No. It was something worse than that. She didn’t want her neighbors and friends to know what she could not admit to herself. Her son, her oldest, darling son, had scalded his baby brother in the bath. So badly that he would be forever scarred all over his body. They would fade, yes. But, contrary to what she told herself, they would always be there. 

James stared at the gold and turned it. After the wood dried, he would fasten the two pieces together. Bill wouldn’t mind that James had used the wire by then. No, James thought, and a smile started to form on his face. The motion pulled at the skin on his neck, tight and shining and red. He would be far too preoccupied. Especially when he saw what happened to Harvey.