‘You’re not too old for a bloody good hiding,’ that was my dad, drunk again and raving. He swayed unsteady on his feet, his eyes bleary. He started to unbuckle the belt around the belly overhanging his trousers.
I’m nineteen and yes I am too old. And too strong. I watch the pathetic little man. What does he think he’s going to do, put me across his knee? If it came to a fight I’d knock six kinds of shit out of him.
It was a mistake coming back.
I first left ‘home’ when I was fourteen, but they set the police onto me and social services got involved. I had my own case worker: yeah, me and a couple of thousand others probably. I only saw her once and that was too much for the use she was.
I left again on my sixteenth birthday and never returned. Until yesterday. ‘Come back to bury your mum,’ aunt Shiela said. We didn’t bury her, we burnt her. Nobody gets put in a grave anymore. Mum was forty-eight. The official cause was pancreatic cancer, but the truth is, she worked herself to death and my lazy, stay-on-the-couch, piece of shit dad, drove her to it.
The wake’s over and there’s just me and dad left. If this was a soap opera, this is where one of us falls down sobbing and we make up and start again as a family.
But this is real life, I shove him away and leave.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 