Spit

When we were kids, my sister and I had this awful habit. We thought it was funny to spit on one another. Our abusive grandparents simply did not approve. After two or three beatings for spitting, they finally went so far as to beat me bloody and senseless. My sister had clumps of hair ripped out of her head.

Funny how malleable children are, huh? Years later, my grandmother walked in on the end of a movie, Diabolique, I believe. It was a thriller with a plot twist at the ending in which she had just walked in on. She was in a flurry: "Quick! Quick! It's an emergency!" Whatever the emergency was, Kathy Bates--as always-- was a gravitational force. My grandmother turned to the movie and stood, watching. "Emergency" forgotten. Now, as a kid, I learned the hard way to never ruin a movie ending for people. So, my sister and I were quickly up in arms: "You're ruining the movie for yourself! Get out!" An argument ensued. My grandmother and I were in each other's faces. She was yelling and some spittle flew from her mouth onto my cheek. I rebuked her with the saying that was trendy at the time: "Say it, don't spray it."

You already know what she did next. She spit in my face. So I strangled her. I had the first "red out" of my life. My fingers and toes tingled quickly, and then a burst of red flashed from all four corners of my vision until I saw only RED. When the rest of the spectrum returned, it was like looking through a telescope. Far down a dark tube I could see my grandmother's cold, confident gray-blue eyes staring me down like she was killing me. But there were hands around her throat. My sister was standing on the bed in the background. It looked like she was screaming, but everything was so far away nothing could be heard.

Suddenly, reality snapped back in full. My vision. The screams of my sister. I dropped my grandmother. Some how I had lifted her girth off the ground by her throat. I was quite young, far from 18 years old.

I let go, cast my eyes to the floor. Said sorry as I pushed passed her out the door. She had the mocking smile of a Sith lord smeared across her face. Not the look of horror we would have expected. This turned the full force of all the horror of the situation on to me with the power of a fire hose.

I escaped to the chicken coop out on the acreage. Scratched another mark into the metal trim to signify how often I'd fled there. The scores of marks reminded me of old movies where the prisoners would track time much like this.