Nicholas Day - At the End of the Day I Burst into Flames

How is high school? Is Mark still an insufferable ass? Sorry. Rhetorical question, I’m sure.

I wish you could be here, but summer will come soon enough. There is a guy named Eric who lives in my dormitory and loves horror movies. He has people over every Thursday night. I can’t wait to show you some of these. They’re so gross. Have you heard of Dead Alive?

I never sent him a letter. I think part of me was jealous because my life was so boring, so average in comparison, and all I could think to tell him was that I missed him. I began to write:

Stephen,

I miss having you around.

Then I stared at the page for a long, long time. It was such a naked statement. I tried to think of something else to say but it was the truth. Every other thing that went through my brain just sounded meaningless. Or mean. I wanted to blame him for leaving, that no one talked to me. That I was alone and it was his fault. That he was really living. His life was becoming an adventure that I couldn’t begin to understand. I wanted to rail at him that the town didn’t want him. That it spit him out but it kept me. That it wanted me.

That I wanted to kill myself.

Those words never went to paper. Instead, I tried to forget him, but summer was coming.

Stephen showed up at my house on a warm day in June. In his hand was a stack of DVDs. He didn’t say hello. There was no hug. There was only a question:

“Want to watch some horror movies?” he asked.

“What do you got?”

“Alright. I have Night of the Living Dead, Zombie, Dead Alive, Dawn of the Dead , and Let Sleeping Corpses Lie .”

“I saw Dawn of the Dead .”

“The remake?”

“That was a remake?”

“This one is from the 70s.”

“Oh, okay, so which one do you want to watch?”

“As many as we can get through.”

“We got to wait till they’re asleep.”

“Fine by me. We can shoot the shit until they pass out.”

Night came quickly. My mom and stepdad went to bed. Stephen said we should watch the films in chronological order. He said it would be better that way. Let it build, he told me. Except, he didn’t say build, he said crescendo.

“Let the gore crescendo until it blows your mind.”

We were about forty-five minutes into Zombie , that scene where the woman gets her eye taken out by a piece of jagged wood, when I realized Stephen was masturbating beside me in the dark. I didn’t dare look at him. He said nothing. There was only the repetitive sound of skin on skin and the occasional sharp breath.

“Look at me.” He said.

“Fuck off.”

He grabbed me by the shoulder. I turned and punched him in the face. Stephen yelped. He put his hands up to his nose and fell backwards onto the floor, his erection resting against his exposed thigh. I ran to the bathroom and locked myself inside.

There was a light tap, tap, tap on the door.

“I’m sorry. Please. Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

My legs were shaking. I sat on the floor.

“Firecracker, how come you never wrote me back?”

I started to cry. “I tried. I really did. But what do you care? You were off fucking around in mathland while I sat here by myself in this shithole. I didn’t want to write you, I didn’t want to have to. I just wanted you to be around, you know? I guess I felt like if I wrote you that I’d have to admit you were really gone. Like really, really gone. You’re my best friend, dickhead, and you left me.”

“I think you busted my nose.”

“Good.”

“Unlock the door so I can use the sink. I don’t want to get blood everywhere.”

I got up and opened the door. Stephen stood in the dark hallway, blood running from both nostrils and his green eyes wet with tears. The low-fi sound of badly dubbed actors being torn apart by zombies murmured quietly from my room. I looked away from him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

I backed up a little to give him clear passage to the sink. But he didn’t go to the sink. He walked right up to me. I still couldn’t look him in the face, and now my heart was beating so hard I thought I might puke.

Stephen placed his palm against my chest and I let myself lean back against the wall.

“Are you going to hit me again?” he asked.

I shook my head and then he started to undo my pants. He pulled on the elastic waist of my underwear and took a hold of me. My body shook. Instinct kicked in and I lowered my jeans to the floor. Stephen went to his knees. The blood from his nose and the spit from his mouth glistened against my skin. I closed my eyes, feeling Stephen and thinking of the blood. The sounds he made, the wet sounds, like the slippery sound of zombie carnage lighting up the television screen in my room.

I could hear people screaming for their lives, but I never heard my mother in the hallway, never heard her stifled cry, never heard her slip away from us and back to her room.

Let the gore crescendo until it blows your mind.

I could barely take a breath as I did that very thing.

Stephen cleaned up in the sink. We fell asleep in my room just before dawn.

When I woke up, Stephen was gathering his movies.

“We almost watched them all.”

“Pretty close.”

“Maybe next time.”

And that was how the summer went, watching movies, getting off and reveling in the gore.

The last night Stephen slept over, we watched Dead Alive for the third time. The lights were off, the room barely illuminated by the flickering television. Stephen’s face was buried in between my legs and I tugged his hair with my hands, bucking against him. On the television, an undead infant ripped its way through a woman’s skull. I smiled, and I turned my head towards the door.

Mother’s face in the dark beyond my bedroom, watching.

I froze.

She backed into the pitch and was gone.

Stephen looked up. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Don’t stop.”

What kind of talk would she want to have in the morning, I wondered? I tried to imagine the horrifying conversations, and then I tried not to imagine anything at all. I wanted a bomb to drop on the house.

I wanted the sun to never rise.

The next morning was uncomfortable and after Stephen left I spent most of it staring at the floor. No one talked. Breakfast was self-serve. To my relief, mother never brought up the incident.

Ever.

Her quiet reservation worried me. She was usually a talker, the kind of person that was happy to offer advice, even if you didn’t want it. I used to think that she fancied herself some kind of suburban, feminine Freud. She always had some theory for me and Dad’s actions. We never did what we did because it was who we were; we did things because of deep psychological issues that we never confronted.

I can remember the sound of her scrubbing dishes in the sink and yelling things at Dad. “You just like football because your father never told you he loved you,” she’d bellow from the kitchen.

“She’s crazy,” Dad would whisper. Then he’d grab the remote and turn the volume up on the television.

Dad was a guy’s guy, you know, a real man’s man. He stood a good six feet tall and had broad, strong shoulders. He had thick arms that he would use to swing Momma in circles, mock dancing in the living room. He could pick me up off the ground and toss me in the air. When you’re a little kid, that’s what God must be like. He enjoyed watching football on television in the winter, and going to baseball games in the summer. Dad could never wrap his mind around the fact that I didn’t care for sports. I guess I get it, you know, that he just wanted me to like what he liked. I think he was trying to shape me into the friend that he always wanted.