The chatter from two newscasters filled our apartment. Their voices bounced across the brownstone walls, hardwood floors, and popcorn ceiling. It was like they were here with us. I heard them clearly from the kitchen. Their voices were toned, confident, authoritative anchors on reality. They managed reality, as they've always known it.
My hands, too small to even wrap entirely around my father's mug, steadied themselves around a children's drink. Something sugary, I remembered.
One of the casters had a voice that pitched up and down intervally, leading into an innocuous pattern that imitated a bird's chirps. The newscasters spoke like an arcane enchanter invoking magic through the words of some dead language. I was surprised it had not put my mother to sleep yet. She was too busy, rather than to even entertain the thought. She always was.
The crackle of the screen brought the voices to life, sprinkling texture among the drivel.
"--Thank you Jennifer. Now, onto the weather--"
The static tickled my ears. As a child, I sat too close to the TV because I liked the way it made me feel; I imagined I was under water. When my mother found me cradled up next to it she would sit me on the couch, scold and wave her finger in my face. Like the petulant child I was, sometimes I did it just because I wanted her attention.
"Ready?" a loud, booming voice asked. My father walked in with his dark long hair hanging past his ears, and an itchy beard frizzled. His hands, at this point in my life, were each larger than my face. Big meaty gloves. He squeezed my shoulders as he nuzzled his face-fuzz against my forehead. His glasses caught a strand of my hair.
The smell of eggs that wafted off of him reminded me of an inner city diner. Greasy line cooks and the smell of coffee filled my imagination. Nostalgic. A kind of dream-feeling I must have inherited from my father, like a strand of DNA. When we pulled apart, he smiled at me, and rubbed his hand in my hair, messing it up even more.
"Stop that!" I said while smiling. I could not hide a smile around him. I was an easily amused kid. I hardly remembered a time when I wasn't happy.
My mother, clearly enjoying the chance to listen in on our conversation, called out from the living room, "Mal! Give the poor kid a break. We just did his hair." She sat hunched over on the sofa in front of our living room TV, a big square box with a glass-like varnish to it. Her work papers scattered across the coffee table in little piles.
Satisfied, my father pulled his hand away. And I was a little disappointed. But not before he pinched my ear.
He always smiled when he heard her moving around the house. Her footsteps always drew his attention to the entrance of our apartment, seemingly minutes before she'd walk through the door. He was a seer, an oracle of the temple to my mother, when it came to her. My mother's piqued, ambient tics were chimes in his ears. His head would swivel when her perfume wafted from the doorway. His affection for her just came so naturally, as if she had always been a part of his life and always would be. She was a part of him. Another arm or leg.
What else mattered more than my parents and my immediate happiness? Nothing. I could assure that. Even sitting a foot away from the TV, hand wrapped around a glass of whatever I had pulled from the fridge that morning, and hours deep into a film I was not yet old enough to legally watch, I knew that it would be better on the couch next to the two of them.
"--Looks like it's gonna be thunderclouds all afternoon, and rolling into the ev--"
As my dad pulled off of me, turning his back towards the stove to fix up some breakfast, my mom slipped into the kitchen. Sometimes her entrances were so sudden, so quiet, that I thought we were haunted by the phantom of some long dead aunt. Bringing her index finger to her lips, she winked and shushed me with the expressiveness of a noir spy. Like a panther, she stalked dad's periphery, hiding within his blindspot, concealing her intentions. In a split second pounce, performed in complete silence, she lunged and hugged him from behind, burying her face in his ragged sweatshirt emblazoned with: Kawaniska Pioneers Baseball Club. He barely reacted. Somehow he just knew she was there. He always knew. At her touch his life as a stay-at-home amateur cook crumbled into dust. His infectious laughter soon spread to my mother, and to me, until our entire kitchen bubbled with it like a tea kettle boiling over.
Sometimes they were just too childish. Like kids on a playground one upping each other. They could care less about modesty or fairness or even keeping to themselves. Mom nuzzled her head beneath his chin just as I did, scratching her cheeks against his beard. Sometimes, when my father wasn't close by, my mother would tell me in secret that she hated how his beard felt, like little prickly pine needles. She thought it was too rough. But in moments like this, I suspected she lied about her disdain for it. No one who hated something that itchy giggled like her as it scratched her nose.
"--careful driving tonight. Looks like it's shaping up to be a heck of a storm--"
Static from the TV crackled like a fireplace. Mom glanced back towards the living room. She frowned when she saw the news. She separated from my father and went to pick up the landline. Her back was to me. It was so tall and imposing back then when I barely stood at the kitchen table's height. Her shoulders were so broad in that dark suit. When she had her back to me I mistook her for a statue. Almost as broad as dad's. Her hair was wrapped in a professional, tight bun. The earrings she chose to wear today glittered subtly. If you were not aware of them you could have spoken with her all day and not realized she was wearing such glittery jewelry. I thought she liked it when people noticed. Those who had the keenness and subtlety to notice were the ones to look out for, she told me once.
"I don't know if I'm comfortable with Monty going to school today," she said to my father. He raised his brow. "It looks like it's going to be Hell to drive in that.". Her voice was floaty, unsure, as if she had tossed something up in the air for us to catch.
"Hey! Language, dear," dad said, laughing. "Then we'll keep him home, in the dungeon." I snickered. "Why are you laughing?" he asked, shocked that I would be so giddy. "I'm sending you straight to the stocks, squirt."
I did not know what he meant by "the stocks" at the time. That little detail did not stop me from treating it like the funniest damn joke in the world. My mother used to say that my father could turn anything he said into a joke. A misspoken word. A turn of phrase. That was just the way he was.
My mother pouted and dialed a phone number. She listened for the other side of the line before she maneuvered her way to the front office. Dad looked down at me and smiled, sliding over a plate of eggs and bacon arranged into a suspiciously delicious grin. I went to town. No cooked bystander was left uneaten. Talk about a public menace.
As I ate, my father patted my head and sat down beside me at the kitchen island. Some butter or bacon grease had spilled on him. I smelled it on his sweatshirt.
"It's not going anywhere. Don't forget to breathe," he joked.
Like a premonition, his head swiveled toward my mother as she talked on the phone. The tone in her voice halted, and in measured spurts of crossed words retaliated, like a soldier firing across no man's land. She crossed her arms. The conversation soured.
"Tell that limp dick money-grubby sycophant that he can go to hell with that offer. I'm not leaving the firm. End. Of. Story." The last three words shelled the conversation like mortars.
My father frowned. I tried to be strong like him because I knew that she got like that when work was brought up. She tried to keep it outside the apartment, but due to the nature of it, trouble followed her everywhere.
"How many times have we had this conversation?" she continued.
"Too many times" was the answer of course. But, she had to make a point.
I glanced at my father and despite his eagerness to keep her away from work was concerned. He noticed me staring and smiled. He pinched my ear with a whisper. "Nothing to worry about, squirt. Your mom's just too dang good at her job."
"Leave it at the office. I thought we settled this months ago," she said. She hung up the phone with a satisfying click. "The f--." She noticed me watching. "--gall of these…these vultures. Won't take no for an answer." She frowned down at her feet. She still had yet to put on her shoes. She sighed, walked over to the two of us, and leaned against my father and I. I nuzzled under her arm. He reached for her shoulder and squeezed.
"We need a stay-in day," my father said. "Just us."
My mother's smile thinned. "I need to go to work, Malachai."
He squeezed harder. "You need a break, Wendy," he mimicked. "They'll be fine on their own for one day." She glanced to the side, still unconvinced. "Besides, the hard parts are done. You said so yourself."
"I just…don't want to fall behind on the litigation. There's so much that could go wrong. What if I made a mistake?"
He shook his head. "Honey, you need authorization from the City Council before moving forward. You already did all you could in the investigation process. Just let things…well, happen. And you didn't make a mistake. You're too dang good at your job."
She smiled thinly. "I wish we could have one normal morning," she said. Going to work meant stress, a worse mood, and pedantic asshole clients. Overall a shit-show of a day. Staying home meant eating like crap, watching a slew of cheesy B-movies, and wasting away all the productivity she's been cultivating with caffeine and late-night homework for the past six months. To me, it was the easiest decision in the world.
Clients. Might as well just be a boogeyman for adults. The two were practically interchangeable.
She sighed and looked at me. "Okay. You win, wiseguys." Her shoulders sagged, as if a great weight was lifted off of them. She reached out and pinched both of our ears. "You've convinced me. Happy now?" Both of us giggled like schoolchildren. At that, the phone started to ring again. She glanced back at it. Like a switch, the mood between the three of us turned.
My father groaned and said as he got up from the island, "What do you think squirt? Movie marathon? I couldn't imagine a better use of our day." He went to work on the frying pan he just used with a barrage of soapy munitions. My mother left the island to answer the phone.
As I entered the hallway between my living room and kitchen I passed by my mother, who gently patted me on the head as she answered the phone again.
"Hold on kiddo, I'm just gonna take this one. Why don't you help your father?"
I nodded and left to go find him.
The living room was silent except for the TV blaring to life with images of winter snowscapes. The snowflakes were like popcorn, falling between the city's cracks. I imagine what it would be like if it really was popcorn. How many people would not go hungry this winter? I idled by the living room sofa and looked towards the tv to catch the tail-end of a weather segment.
I noticed the windows behind our TV. Light streamed in between the cracks in the curtains like thin filaments of radiating heat. The ribbons crawled across the TV and the carpet, almost reaching the coffee table and all of my mother's work documents. I threw open the curtains and my senses were immediately assaulted by a wintery wonderland. Outside our apartment in Midtown, the blizzard bathed our city in a white blanket. Flecks of snowflakes fell from rooftop to rooftop like doves. The further the skyline extended outward, the more the city was engulfed by a roving fog. It was like the buildings were increasingly refuged behind panes of opaque glass. Layer by layer.
"--This is a blizzard for the history books, folks. Make sure to stay safe out there--"
If we went to school today, it would have been so fun to play in the snow. Snow angels, snow ball fights. It was a kid's dream. Before long, I felt the cold and snow seeping beneath my coat, encroaching on the warmth that radiated out from me. I was there walking across the street, dodging clumps of wet slush and sliding over ice.
My mother's suitcase leaned against the coffee table. Since she was staying home today, I thought it'd be nice to take care of her things for her. I carefully collected up the paper, feeling the dried ink on my fingertips. As I collected her things, I heard my mother speaking on the phone.
A click from my father turned the TV's sound down. He pointed the remote at the TV and said, "Come on, squirt. You choose the first one." I turned around and followed him over the stack of DVDs nestled on the second shelf of a nearby bookcase. I chose a few that stood out to me. Stuff we've already seen a thousand times over, but never could get enough of. At least I could not get enough of it. I did catch my father groaning as I chose one film I was particularly affectionate of.
"Again?" he asked. It was meant as more of a plea. Or a cry for help. "Alright."
I heard my mother's voice call out to my father. "Mal, can you call the school please? Let them know Monty is very, very sick." She sounded a little too excited that her son was sick. Surely the school would have caught on to our ruse if we were not careful.
"Aye aye," my father said. He rose from our spot and went into the kitchen to call the school.
I leaned back on my hands. Our apartment was modest. Small but cozy. Especially on winter mornings like that one. We were lucky to find a place like it in the middle of Midtown for this price. I did not know at the time, obviously because I was nine, but places like it usually went for half my mother's paycheck. And she was a lawyer. Granted, a municipal one.
My father used to be a firefighter. But at this point in his life he was a stay at home dad. He liked it. He made breakfast almost every morning, did the dishes like a madman, and folded laundry while watching his favorite soap operas and movies. He never seemed to mind it. He had a quiet confidence people would find infectious. I noticed it whenever he spoke to our neighbors.
"I'm not very confident," he told me once. "Your mother's confident. I just hoped some of it would rub off on me. Why do you think we got married?"
"Because you enjoyed each other's company?"
"Worse," he said. "Your mother tolerated me. I couldn't let someone like that go." I always thought he was being too modest. Only recently did I start to question if he really meant that about himself.
"As if you had any choice," she said from around the corner. Content, he returned to folding some clothes.
Today, a pile of unfolded laundry sat in the corner of our living room, next to a fake plant in the corner, one that I was pretty sure had cobwebs in the folds of its leaves. Above the hamper hung a framed photo of my father with his precinct. Hair just as long as it was today, but his beard was more of a 'stache. To the left of the photo hung my mother's doctorate of law.
As I said before, my mother was a lawyer. She was a damn good lawyer. She worked herself to the bone. I remembered how visceral she was when it came to her work. She'd come home sometimes with dark bags under her eyes, a stiff back, and thoroughly exhausted. One time my father tried to get her to join us for a movie on the couch when she got home late one evening and she declined to go lay down. I thought she had the worst job in the world at the time. I would look at my father and see the enjoyment he got out of staying home, enjoying his hobbies, taking care of the house, and greeting my mother at the end of her day with big open arms and compare it to the grueling effort she put into her job and question if it was the right thing for her.
She never said she hated her job. She never regretted her law degree either. "Monty," she said, sitting me down one evening. "I like what I do. I wouldn't give it up for anything. We all have to make sacrifices for the things we love. Your father has had to make some too. Sometimes I just come home a little tired, and that's fine. Or maybe I won't complete a case as successfully as I maybe would have wanted to be." She leaned in and nuzzled her head against mine. The smell of chocolate filled my nose.
"One day you'll find something that you'll love to do more than anything else in the world and nothing will stop you from doing what you want. Until then, don't worry about it. Mess around, try new things, and fail. You'll always have someone to lean on to get you through the tight spots." She messed up my hair, just as my father liked to do.
Outside our window, the clouds of the winter storm coalesced and condensed. The storm blanketed the city skyline, slowly covering Midtown in shade. Snow fell on the windowsill. The windowpane itself darkened with frost.
My father's recliner sat below the window with its curtains still drawn open. I climbed on it and watched as the snowflakes slid down the glass. Something behind me hissed. I turned to look and nobody was there. I was still alone in the living room. I turned back to the window and heard it again.
I jumped down from the recliner in search of the originator of that strange noise. I checked under the recliner itself, behind the sofa, on the coffee table. Then when I went to check the TV, I heard it again. Static. I sighed. It was just static coming from the TV. The news was still on. It was just that the sound was turned down pretty low. But as I fiddled with the volume, I realized there was a low hum that came from the TV. I whacked the side of it with an open palm and the sound stopped.
The overhead light flickered. On and off.
A presence manifested behind me. I hardly heard it. I breathed in deeply. Its hand touched my shoulder. "Hey bud, you, okay? You were staring at the TV there for a minute." My father's voice was firm, but warm. I blew out in relief.
"Yea, dad. Sorry."
"It's okay Monty. Good news. We got the whole day free. Just the three of us."
I smiled up at him.
"Remember what mom said?" he continued. "Don't sit too close to the TV."
"Okay," I said.
"Good kid." He left without saying anything more. He passed by my mother, who was still on the phone, and turned into the kitchen. A rough hissing noise emerged from where he vanished. It was probably our coffee maker turning on. A crosswind of the delicious scent of coffee beans floated in. He must have been pouring his morning cup of coffee.
Peering around the corner, I noticed my father and mother talking in low hushed whispers. My mother had a sour look, as if she was feeling ill. My father looked like he was comforting her. The landline sat on the receiver, silent and stone-like.
"Monty," my mother said after noticing me. She smiled in the way that mothers do when they want to show off for their kids. "Nothing to worry about. Did you pick out our movies for today?"
I nodded.
"Keeping your father on track I see," she said. She raised her eyebrow at him.
My father laughed. He came over, placed his hand on my back, and gently guided me towards the living room. "Come on, squirt. Let's get the place cleaned up and ready. Mom has to make one final call."
"Another one?" I asked.
He hummed yes. "She'll be in soon."
We stepped into the living room. The TV was turned off. I did not remember turning it off before I left.
Three phone calls. I never figured out who she spoke with that morning. Who called. Whether she called them three times or if they initiated the calls. There was never a point that I could trace those numbers back, or ask my mother who they were that took up her time during our last normal morning. Nothing that could justify being separated from her for a few minutes.
"I'll just be one second," my father said. He turned around and left me just for a few minutes. I did not watch him leave. My attention was captured.
In front of me was a panel of glass.
At first, I thought it was glass. Opaque and transparent. Like the windows in the living room, frosted over with a thin layer of ice. Like the skyscrapers that blocked out the sun in Downtown in the middle of winter. Like wind chimes slowly trembling in a cold breeze. The thing sat suspended in the middle of the living room. Almost completely invisible to the naked eye. If I did not notice it sooner, I would have probably walked straight into it.
My father was out of sight, out of the way. That meant I alone saw it suspended there at that moment. For a moment the strange specter of light was my secret. My only secret. One part intimate, another part resistant.
I stepped forward. A warmth enveloped me. In the thread of time that existed between my being there and the anomaly a tangle occurred. Linearity was severed. Continuum denatured.
The anomaly was cracked. Shards of refracted light suspended in space-time. A light inside of it prepared to burst through the brittle shell and into the room. I stood there motionless. Afraid of the possibility of doing anything else. Afraid that if I screamed then it would get me. Afraid of the infinite anything that this unknown entity inspired. And I shivered.
I closed my eyes. It would go away if I did not look at it, right? What would my mother and father say? Get up. Get away. Get help. But my legs would not get me anywhere.
Static crackled like crumbling glass.
I started to feel it, the splitting pixels of the TV as static filled the room. It crawled over my skin. Gave me goosebumps like I never believed I could experience. My vision blurred.
It sputtered.
It coursed through my fingertips. It felt like my hands were falling asleep. A light tingling that was both cold and warm to the touch.
It sputtered again…then snapped.
The air cracked like lightning. An implosion plunged the apartment in a maelstrom of electric fury and an all-encompassing pressure. I barely had a second to process what happened. The pressure had burst out from the invisible entity to the carpet, to the coffee table, to the couch, and to me. Its chaotic tendrils split the coffee table down the center. Cotton innards spewed out between the cushions and vases and glass photo frames shattered into volleys of sparkling snow. The DVD's smashed against the wall. My mother's suitcase, and the paper within, was caught up in the table's destruction. The pressure weighed me down like a heavy blanket. A stranger appeared at the nexus of the anomaly.
He was tall with dark, scraggly hair reaching well past his ears. His eyes were cobalt blue and seemingly glowed in the light of the supernatural energy erupting around him. Or were they actually glowing? He wore a blue and white body suit, with some sort of symbol on the front chest. He looked like…I didn't know what exactly he looked like. He looked dangerous.
I was too stunned to speak. All I could do was stare. He looked at me and smiled, like he was looking at a friend--someone he has known for a very long time. It was like looking at a broken picture frame of someone I used to know. I felt…sorry for him.
The shouts from my parents were muffled, like I had been plunged into the deep end of a pool, and I was too far from the surface to climb out. They were already rushing into the living room before I could cry for them. They placed themselves between me and the stranger. I think even then, I knew there was nothing we could do.
But as my parents stood up to the stranger, I could feel their eyes soften. They shouted and threatened to call the police, but my father quickly went quiet, and my mother followed. They looked like they knew him, their eyes glowed that same blue, like the blue of my eyes, an electric, cobalt-blue. The last time I saw my parents was when I curled around to look back at them as they realized who was standing in the room. My father knelt down and held me. My mother remained standing, facing the stranger and glancing back at me one final time.
"I am so⏤so sorry. Please forgive me." His voice cracked, and the smile wavered, but it did not look cruel. His eyes were soft.
"Monty--"
All I remembered next was a sudden piercing sound, and a light that flashed like sputtering sunspots. It grew and enveloped us, the room, our apartment. And seemingly the world.
My last normal morning ended in a flash of bright white light.
An image burned into my mind like a smoldering brand that would never heal for as long as I live.