This story was originally selected for publication in Virginia Commonwealth University’s 1992 annual, Richmond Arts Magazine. Thank you to Dennis Danvers and Gregory Donovan for the early encouragement in creativity.
The boy placed his palm against the door, the print of each finger dancing lightly across the surface as if the door were too hot to touch or so cold the skin would stick to the frozen wood. He turned the knob with his other hand and pushed the door open. The light from the hall fell onto the floor, first just a sliver that flew across the room and shot up the wall, then in an ever-dimming arc that barely lit the room when the door stood wide open. He stood framed in the doorway and looked up over his shoulder at the bare bulb in the hall. How strange, he thought, that the light that had seemed so bright, so revealing with the door closed, was now so dull, so unable, it seemed, to shed any of its light into the room.
The blinds on the windows were shut and the little bit of light that seeped between the slats painted the room in the various shades of a grey and somber palette, the yellow light form the hall just tinting the walls enough to make them look sick and jaundiced. He stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, keeping the knob turned so the latch wouldn’t click in the catch. With the door settled back into its frame, he held his breath and turned his hand, slowly, patiently, allowing the latch to slide back into place without a sound. He was afraid, afraid that the click of the lock would echo through the house bouncing off the walls back and forth and back and forth until the walls shook with an echoing chorus of a thousand clicking locks. He sucked in a heavy sigh and looked at his hand, its grip so tight that his knuckles were as white as the white of the porcelain doorknob. The hand felt hot and moist. It wanted to stick to the knob, but he let go of it and held the back of it up to his face, feeling the heat radiate off the palm and noticing how smooth the skin seemed. No scars, no scrapes or scabs or cracks, just the smooth and almost hairless back of his hand, crisscrossed by the darker lines that traced the paths of his blood.
Not like his father’s hand. A hard hand. Tough, calloused, the tip of the left index finger missing, an accident during the war. A middle finger slightly crooked, broken in a fight and not healed right, just set with some tape and a couple of popsicle sticks. You’ve got to take it like a man. The pain. Yeah, and the fights and the insults and the bruises and breaks, not just the body, boy, but the soul and the life that seems like it’ll never end, but one day it will. You just have to keep fighting to keep it. That’s what his father knew and that’s what his father told him. A hard, calloused hand.
He let his hand fall to his side and went over to one of the windows. There wasn’t a cord on the blind to open the slats anymore; it had broken off some time ago and his father hadn’t had time to fix it before he left, seeing as he would have to take the blind down from the window to get at its inside workings to put a new cord on. So he just left it alone, not wanting to pull the blind all the way up to the top of the window. He didn’t want anyone to see in and he didn’t want to look out of it either, so he went to the other window which had a cord still and tugged on the string to open the slats just a little. Lines of light, he noticed, sitting on the edge of the bed, lines of light that never connect, never fill in the picture of even the one small view of the world outside the window. He could, he reminded himself, pull the blinds up and see that view, but not without someone seeing inside, too. Seeing him, alone in the room.