Page 2 of Trig

“You know, I could just come into your home in the middle of the night and slice both of their throats just to watch them bleed out.”

I can’t fucking breathe on most days. It’s my own personal hell to keep taking lives so that the people I love can live. Not just that, but to be working under Carmen, the same man who broke me and made me who I am today is sickening. It’s a mental punishment for me that he thoroughly enjoys. I see it written all over his smug face. This fucker has my soul in a mason jar, and every so often, he rattles it to shake things up, and with our history, it doesn’t take much. He tells me it’s payback for my choices but sometimes I think he’s just bored in this industry. Maybe someone should recommend politics to him.

Carmen is a drug lord. The Savior worked for him, and I used to work for The Savior, that was, until I killed him. Carmen’s prime interest is to take the unwilling executioners and make them willing. He’s Satan in the flesh and he’s been on my mental kill list for years. One day I’ll break him the way he broke me, and then I’ll cut him open from mouth to balls to end my misery. That there will be the closing of my wounds, and then I’ll finally bury the one secret I’ve been keeping inside of my head all these years. It’s something that makes my chest tighten, throat close, and head pound. The acid rises from my stomach when terrible thoughts of it begin to spill over, and when they do, I quickly beat them into submission as if my life depended on it.

Calm Down. Relax. It was you or him, Trig. You had no choice. Think of something else. Think of something nice. Think of… her.

It’s like a damn mantra I use when my thoughts spiral out of control. It works. I quickly push Carmen and this secret out of the picture. My brain changes lanes and if I concentrate on Nine, I don’t feel like I’m losing my mind. She has no idea how sane she makes me feel, but we can’t be happy. Not like this. Not with him forcing me to do this again. It’s like every time I see Carmen, I think about that classified information I hide, and every time I see Nine, I think about Carmen coming to kill her, and I so badly wish it was just me and her and my kid living a normal life like it was for a few years. Just a basic-ass boring family doing basic-ass boring shit. I want to give that to her so badly. I want to give it to myself. We deserve it, but Carmen is making happiness and peace impossible. He’s not content with the permanent scars he’s provided me in the past. He’s hungry to deliver more because I’ve messed up his matrix of an operation by killing The Savior, and now he owns me. And if I refuse, my whole family is either his for the taking or target practice.

Fucking dickhead, asshole, piece of shit, motherfucker! I loathe him. I am drowning in ideas to end his existence but it never seems to be the perfect time to take him out without repercussions. I’m afraid one wrong move will end Nine and Mya, and if that happens, I’ll never forgive myself. It would be the end of my existence. So instead, I continue drowning in misery as the clock ticks and the stars refuse to align. Unloading mags and bathing in blood just to go home, switch gears, and put on my perfect father and adoring fiancé face.

My twisted journey up to this very moment can best be described as an organized catastrophe. There has been a lot of tragedy and pain. Definitely more than the average person can bear. This hitman gig alone should be the cake topper of my affliction since it keeps haunting me, but it hasn’t always been my most painful story. There once was, or shall I say, is something much bigger, uglier, and soul-darkening that transpired. An event. A secret. One that I keep in an imaginary box that involves Carmen. To understand how I got here I think it’s time to open the lid and let that bitch breathe. I’m about to air it all out and I hope you can handle it!

The series of events that have royally fucked up my life, featuring “my secret.”

By Trigger Matthews

HERE WE GO!

Everything went to hell because of him, and by “him” I don’t mean my brother Hunter, and I’m not talking about Carmen. There was an initial spark. It was someone else who caused a slow-burning flame within our home that eventually resulted in the burn-it-all-down type destruction of our entire family and is the reason I am where I am.

I can’t bring myself to say his name. It carries a weight too heavy to bear. It makes me physically sick to think about him. Sour memories occasionally tear through me like razor blades on my worst days. The pain and guilt still eat away at me like a group of savage hungry piranhas when I remember all the details. That’s why I convinced myself a long time ago that he caused all of this, and by doing that, I learned how to hate myself just a little less for what I did. It helps to take the sting out of the injury, but not much. No matter how much I want to forget it, I can’t. I can talk myself down all day, but it’s still there. Every look. Every word. Every ounce of pain. It taunts me, and until I can bury his ghost, two things will stay forever etched into my mind. One. The day our father abandoned us. Two. The day I killed him.

I live with it every day. I know how brutal it sounds, but everything is not always what it seems. I can blame my father all I want, because it helps me sleep at night, but it’s not really his fault. It’s a complicated story that needs to be told to understand the chain of un-fucking-believable events that is my life, starting with this whole daddy abandonment issue. So, buckle up. Shits about to get real.

I was raised in an average neighborhood, in an average family. There was nothing dysfunctional about us. We were perfect. The All-American family, hosting cookouts, and planning birthday parties. My parents adored each other, and we children were inseparable. That was… until the shit hit the fan.

My father, Jack is what we’ll call him, suddenly decided he needed space, or a new life, or whatever the fuck it was that made him disappear into thin air. I don’t know what caused him to get up and take off in the middle of the night when he had responsibilities, but he did it. He slipped out like nothing, leaving a wife and three kids all blaming themselves. My mother thought if she were a better wife, he would have stayed. My siblings and I were young at the time. I was five years old. My brother, Hunter, was seven, and my sister, Torrie, was nine. We all thought that if we had behaved better, he would have stayed. If only we had picked up our toys, and answered when he called us, that he’d still be here. The truth was that it was no one’s fault, but at the time, we just couldn’t wrap our heads around it. How does a responsible and caring person like my father just up and leave? A person who tucked us kids in at night and swore on his heart that he loved us more than all the planets in the solar system. I mean, how do you walk away from your wife, the one woman who gave her all to you? I don’t get it.

There’s no closure when someone you love does it. It’s not like before a divorce where the parents fight to the death, and you just know a split is coming, eventually. When someone vanishes, all that’s left is a million questions and no answers. It’s like looking at a puzzle that’s almost complete, but one piece is missing, and no matter how hard you look for that piece, you just know it’s gone. Even so, you still keep looking and hoping that it will pop up, that way, you can feel like the picture is complete. That’s the only way I can describe what our house was going through. It was an everlasting search for our missing piece, my father.

After several months, we learned to accept the fact that he wasn’t coming back. Police couldn’t find him. Banks couldn’t trace him, and my mother stopped waiting by the living room window for his return. She stopped making that extra plate of food at dinnertime, and she stopped crying at night. All the hope she was holding on to, she threw into three large boxes with his clothes and small belongings. She had moved on from sadness and let anger take over. Those boxes filled with all of his things, she tossed them out like trash, and my siblings and I looked out the window as she did it. That was her cutting the rope around her neck. It was the end of her suffering. It was a farewell and fuck-you note to him in her mind for the pain he had caused. We all sat there on the couch that night, torn up inside. I don’t think we children were quite ready to say goodbye, but if it stopped her from drinking herself to sleep every night, then so be it.

It wasn’t easy for any of us, but the real weight of everything fell upon mom’s shoulders. She had kids to feed and bills to pay. We saw her struggle, but being that little we didn’t know what to do. We just followed her lead. She picked up two jobs to keep our house running and my older sister, Torrie, took care of Hunter and me while she did it. When Torrie was tired, Hunter took care of me. The stress wore on everyone. It was a mess that forced me to hate my father, because he made one decision that affected four people’s lives, and he will never know the destruction he caused when he left. He won’t know that my mother suffered from severe depression, and that my sister became resentful. He won’t know that my brother became violently angry, and that I became numb watching everyone else fall apart. It would just be us, four emotional human beings processing abandonment in four completely different ways, and he would never know the pain in our hearts.

It would take several years before we had a normal life again. My mother picked up a new job that paid her triple what she was making working two jobs, and the financial damage caused by my father leaving was lifted. All unpaid bills were now caught up and food was stocked in the fridge regularly. Everyone seemed to be happier. The dark cloud of the past still loomed around us and we all knew it, but now we could breathe a little easier.

My mother eventually saved up money and bought a getaway cabin next to a lake in the mountains of Las Vegas and she took us there mostly in the summers. It was a place where we could create new memories, from our childhood up until our late teen years. We were different now. A family with no worries. I couldn’t name a better time in our life, but then something happened. Reality. It was sure to pull up on time and smack us dead in the face.

Mom was stricken with an illness, not once, but twice. The first time she became ill, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer, but she fought hard and beat it like a champion. It was a proud moment knowing our mother wasn’t going anywhere. If she could continue to rise from the ashes like she always had, nothing on earth could knock this woman down, not even cancer.

We were wrong. We thought we were in the clear, that she was untouchable, but six years later, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. That’s when devastation hit. Doctors spoke to us as if this was her death sentence. There were many words used such as maybe, possibly, and hopefully when it came to treatment options. Their eyes told me all I needed to know. We were just stalling the inevitable. I think they called it extending her life, but the cost would be insane to do it, and there was no guarantee that any of it would actually work. Days started to pass, and before we knew it, several months had flown by. By this time, Hunter had taken to the streets to make money to pay for her medical bills, Torrie had started dating a sugar daddy to help contribute, and I was the youngest, so my job would be to watch mom. I stayed by her side day in and day out. The treatments didn’t work, but the doctors pressed on about using stronger chemotherapy. She just grew sicker and sicker. I watched her slowly fade away. I no longer saw a champion, but a victim.

It bothered Torrie. The vomiting, hair loss, and weakness. The frail bones lying there. She couldn’t take it anymore. She left, and I mean she literally ran off with her boyfriend, leaving Hunter and I to deal with our dying mom. It just added more stress to our plate. Mom was in and out of the hospital so much at one point they just kept her there. The financial weight now fell on Hunter, and no matter how much money he put up, it was useless. Her health continued to decline. My brother was tired and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The hospital staff angered him with their bullshit responses. Hunter didn’t understand that money couldn’t buy Mom a cure. Staff could stand there and explain things to him until they were blue in the face. It didn’t stop him from raging out, and one day he completely lost it.

“I’m sorry there is not much more we can do,” the doctor said.

“I told you, if she dies, you die!” Hunter yelled, as he beat the poor guy to the floor. A day that resulted in total chaos. Cops swarmed in and arrested my brother while hospital staff started working on the doctor he almost killed. Two of the most important people in my life were now not around. I felt afraid because everything was now on me. The downward spiral didn’t end there, because after that event, I watched a heartbreaking movie play out in front of me. One in which I already knew the ending.

Positive vibes, good energy, and rays of fucking sunshine were nowhere nearby. My sister was gone. My brother was in jail, and my mom was at death’s door. The day had come. I could feel it in my bones. The air in the room seemed to be a bit colder and the darkness in her eyes told me her time was up.

“Don’t do this to her. Not now,” I pleaded, and looked up to the ceiling. I felt as if God had been punishing this poor woman for most of her life. She didn’t deserve this, and neither did I. Then she spoke. My ears devoured the sound of her broken voice, afraid they’d never hear it again.

“I love you, Trigger. Always and forever.”

“Always and forever, Mom,” I responded, choking back the tears.

It was over just like that. She took her last breath with my big fingers wrapped around her delicate soft hand. Her heart rate monitor flatlined, causing reality to hit me. The woman who gave birth to me would no longer exist, and I couldn’t fucking handle it. Time stopped. The room spun and my chest heaved. It’s as if all the oxygen in the room left right along with her and I sat there unable to steady myself. I could no longer hold back the wave of emotions building up and the tears poured out of my eyes like heavy rain. Every part of me was shaking. There was no going back from this. No fix and repeat button. She was gone and I never felt so alone on this earth.

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