Scotch Breath

I was recently looking through my folder of short stories that I am going to write for my third year and started rearranging them so they made sense. I decided my theme would be relationships and hopefully lead it into violence. A few weeks ago I put the beginning of a story about domestic abuse on my blog but I've decided to revamp it. Below is the beginning to a story I completed last year about domestic abuse, only, unlike the other, it has a child-like quirk that I found to be the point of the story. The breaking of innocence, you might say.

The boy had found himself in that same position once again.

Like most nights he was curled up on the bathroom floor, knees tucked into his chest as his ear pressed against the cold tiles. He heard the muffled sounds which slowly grew, hitting the ceiling, roaring in his ears. The growls from his father’s mouth, the screams from his mother and the occasional sound of glass being smashed – that was the most deathly of sounds. A glass smashing meant two things: the drink would be over the ground and his mother would be forced to clean it. The boy knew the scene all too well. When the glass smashed he would sit down in a chair and bark orders at the woman who would go on her hands and knees and clean up his mess. He was the man who made the mess, always making the mess, always, always.

            The boy couldn’t help but feel a surge of happiness when his mother finally shot back her own unhappiness. “This is not the life I wanted,” was one of his favourites, it always managed to get his father right to the core, always made that silence, that lingering silence where you could tell that he was thinking. “You drink too much,” was one that happened on the very rare occasions, only when his father had had too much to drink, when he would wake up with his eternal amnesia. 

“I hate you.”

That was the one.

That was the one that made him angry, very angry indeed. That was the one that led to the screams, not screams of anger but screams that would issue with such ferocity and pain from his mother’s mouth that the only thing he could do was clap his hands over his ears and wish for the screams to stop. It was the screams that would make him wish, make him wish that he was big and strong, that he could stop his father, hurt his father. But he was a little boy. A little boy with little ideas.