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When I was watching them move in I could only think about how annoyingly Norman Rockwell they were. A young man and his wife and their two-point-five kids. A bright orange U-Haul parked in front of the house, and them scurrying back and forth carrying cardboard boxes; the youngest, a child of seven, trying to stumble to the door with a box that was clearly too large for him, the mother standing on the concrete driveway giggling and hurrying over to help him. It was all sickeningly homey. Sure the parents can laugh at them and enjoy them now, but when they get older it'll be different. The youngest one that was carrying the box will start smoking pot in a few years, maybe when he's eleven or twelve. He'll get killed when he's seventeen and had too much to smoke at a party and wraps his car around a lightpost. Pity. The other one, the one that looks to be about ten is going to be kidnapped next summer. Not this summer, but the one after. They won't find his body for a while, but they will eventually. They'll find it beneath a sewer grate a few blocks away. It's sad about that one. You see, the kidnapping of his brother and the loss of his mother is what will turn the younger to drugs. It's not the mother's fault, she did the best she could, but sometimes things like this happen. She just couldn't accept the child's death. It's a tragedy that she'll die the way she does, but someone should have told her that sleeping pills and alcohol don't mix. But, maybe she knew that. Anything's possible. I assume, well hope, she thought the father would be home first, but school will let out early that day and the boy will come home all happy, proud because he got a perfect score on that week's spelling test. He thinks his mom will be happy too, she had been helping him study. I can almost see him walk up the driveway, his little red and yellow knapsack slung over his shoulder, his perfect paper in his little hand. He'll open the door and walk in, calling her name happily in his young voice, and then he'll bound up the stairs and into her room, jumping onto her bed. But the problem is she doesn't wake up. He'll drop his paper with the one-hundred written on it and circled in red beside her and stain it with a single teardrop before he climbs off her bed and walks to his room to cry himself to sleep. He'll cry himself to sleep until he's thirteen. Pity. Eventually the father will send him to his grandparents, while he tries to sort things out. While he's gone the father spends his days exhausting the world's supply of Gin, and his nights exhausting the world's supply of women. The kid will come back, and 'daddy? will catch him sneaking drinks from the fridge, which earns the kid a lesson in self-defense which he fails, and loses two teeth as a penalty. This will be the last mistake the father ever makes, because as soon as he passes out in his chair in the living room, the boy grabs a knife from the kitchen and does some instruction of his own. They'll never get the blood off the walls completely. The boy leaves for a party a few hours later. |
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Clare Maguire > 6dec2002 > The Face of The Future |
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