Page 2 of The Truths We Burn

It’s amazing what you find funny when you’ve seen what I have. When you’ve been through what I have. Comedies featuring Seth Rogan and Will Ferrell just don’t do it for me anymore.

“You’re getting old,” I choke out. “I can barely feel these now. You should hit the gym.”

“Ah!” he yells loudly, charging down on top of me, both knees on either side of my chest, his fist connecting solidly with my face. I taste the blood from my split lip, the metallic sting warming my tongue. “I should just kill you! You should have died—it should have been you!”

Throbbing pain shoots through my skull as he grabs the front of my shirt, picking up my upper half from the ground only to toss me straight back down. Damn, that’s going to give me a headache.

Over and over again, he lifts me up just to sling me back down. I’m swimming in my head, stars dancing in the corners of my eyes. Another concussion added to the growing list of injuries received from the man who created me.

“Then do it! Kill me!” I shout in my haze, feeling every ounce of this. Drowning in it. Allowing it to submerge me completely.

I hear his heavy breathing when he stops shaking me, and I stare up at the man who once taught me how to throw a baseball, who would toss me up on his shoulders so I could see over crowds, a man who used to look at me with fatherly love.

Now all I see inside of his eyes is the bloodshot misery I put there. The anguish I gifted him. I’d killed the part of him that believed in happiness, in good, in everything light.

This is my land of atonement.

This is what makes the pain feel so fucking good.

Knowing I deserve it.

“I hate you.” He seethes. Spit flies from his tongue and smacks me on the face. “You’re nothing but the devil. You will pay for this, all your wickedness.”

There it is.

My darling nickname. His favorite for me.

The devil.

El diablo.

Lucifer.

I had been an angel once, when I was a kid, before I was cast out of the good graces and left to burn.

Church used to be somewhere I didn’t mind going. When my mother was alive, and we were all happy. Now I’d catch fire walking through the door.

We stay there, staring each other down with enough contempt and fury to power New York City during a goddamn apocalypse. Deep breathing and damning history that will never be washed cleaned from our memories.

I have taken the man who thinks logically and analytically, turned him into a brash, impulsive beast. I made him into an older version of myself, both of us caught in our own version of purgatory.

I’ve ruined my father.

And every day he makes me pay for that. With his hands, his words, his religion.

A blaring horn seems to snap him back to a bit of his sanity as I swallow, trying to shove the dryness down my throat. “Welcome to the club.”

I push his hands off me as he climbs off my body, leaving me lying there without a hand to help me up. Not like I thought he would assist me, but it was worth noting.

Even at seventeen, I stand taller than him as I rise to my feet. A couple of inches allows me to stare down at him, my hair falling in front of my eyes some. “At least have the balls to finish the fucking job next time.”

His shoulders heave as he takes breaths, coming back to reality. He stalks to the kitchen to grab the whiskey glass on the table, raising it to his lips and pouring it down his throat.

The irony of it all is that he grabs his Bible off the counter next to it.

“You think God is going to help you while you’re drowning your liver? Gluttony is pretty high up on his lists of what not to do.”

I might be a bastard, but at least I’m not a hypocrite.

---