by Jack Somers
Dennis left on a Saturday morning. He called Mom a miserable bitch, emptied his drawer in the bedroom, and thundered out the front door. I was relieved. Of all the boyfriends she had brought home over the years, I liked Dennis the least. He took money out of my piggy bank to buy booze and smacked me whenever I bounced my basketball too close to his Camaro.
That afternoon, Mom drank an entire bottle of Merlot and carved a lightning bolt-shaped line in her left forearm with a serrated kitchen knife. I wrapped her arm in a dishtowel and hugged her until she stopped crying.
After she fell asleep, I emptied the knife block into my backpack, grabbed the garden spade, and walked into the woods behind our house. I went further in than I’d ever been before. I wanted to bury those knives some place Mom would never find them.
About ten minutes into my walk, I came upon a large metal drum with two portholes at one end and a child-sized door on the right. The door was halfway open, so I peeked inside. There were two cots on the floor surrounded by a dozen wooden crates. The crates were crammed with canned goods. The whole place smelled like dust and disuse, like a hot attic. I buried the knives behind the drum and tramped back home.
The next day Mom went on one of her cleaning kicks. She vacuumed the house twice, scrubbed the baseboards, washed the shower curtains, and bleached the sinks. When she discovered the knives were missing, she lost it. “What the hell did you do with them you little shit!” she screeched. “Do you have any idea how much those cost?”
I ran back to the drum, not to get the knives but to hide. I had to get away from Mom’s rage, her mania, her misery.
In the drum, all was still. I curled up on one of the cots and closed my eyes.
I started going to the drum every day after that. I felt protected there, shielded. I filled the place with baseball cards and comic books, bags of Fritos, 2-liter bottles of Pepsi, pouches of Big League Chew. It became my club, my sanctuary, my world. Bradonia. Mom never asked where I was going. I doubted she even noticed I was gone.
One day I fell asleep in the drum. I woke to the sound of pounding on the door. I knew it was Mom. The instant I stepped outside, she slung her scarred arms around me. She was crying as hard as the day she cut the lightning bolt.
“I thought you’d left me,” she said, pressing my face against hers.
“I won’t leave you,” I whispered into her slick cheek.
I didn’t just say it to calm her down. I meant it. I would never leave her. She needed me. Everyone needs a refuge.
Jack Somers’s work has appeared in WhiskeyPaper, Jellyfish Review, Literary Orphans, and a number of other publications. He lives in Ohio with his wife and their three children. You can find him on Twitter @jsomers530.
The Sunday Solace series focuses on mental health and medication. We hope to provide a judgment-free space to explore and discuss our struggles in a creative manner.