My Father and His Secret (BoyxBoy)

Past

I first started to notice he wasn't a normal man when I was, say, around 4 or 5, in about 1766. My father, he never ate, he never came outside, — see, this was a big issue, for I loved our front garden and the city — and he hardly ever left that damned room.

I still feel the sadness building in my throat thinking of it, that room, that dark room, when it was full of life of candles licking towards the cobwebbed ceilings and beautiful women in nothing but a frock coat of his.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

He locked my door every night. I was to be in bed by 9 when the sun set and he would come to unlock it at 7 the next morning.

I begged him not to, but he refused. I had to beg for most things, and most of which he refused. I began begging for a real father.

It surprised me when the boys I'd meet in the city spoke of their homes and their fathers. They spoke of their mothers, too, and I begged for one of those.

They said their homes were bright and clean, and so I never let them in mine, simply because I was ashamed that my home wasn't.

I told my father. I told him I wanted brighter walls, papered with lively flowers and without ash and grime stuck between the petals. I told him I wanted the curtains gone, those long, black curtains as old as me that shut out the sun. I told him he needed sun, he needed to come with me to the city and see the sun and the clouds hiding behind the tall buildings of Paris with me and hold my hand and kiss me and hug me like a father would.

He was as mad as I had ever seen him, "You arrogant boy," I remember he shouted. "Your friends lie! And they live as we do!"

I told him he was a liar and he sent me to bed.

Now I reminisce of that house. It was our home forever, and now forever has passed. It was far out from the city, and we had to hire a carriage boy all for me just so I could travel there, always alone. It was slightly shorter than the thousands of trees surrounding it, but it blended right in with them with its dark, or possibly just old, wooden frame and black shingles, green and purple vines of wisteria covering the front.

I would have thought that was were my father got my name, but he hadn't seen the outside of the home, he had never been here.

It had only been a few nights since then our argument, perhaps more, but all time from my childhood bled into one long book without chapters. I was 8, when I picked the lock — a trick a city boy had shown me — and I thought I had been so lucky that he didn't hear me escape. I planned on sneaking into his room, seeing what it looked like. I was so euphoric, I could have walked right into that room and kissed the only man I've ever known and promise I'd be the best boy for the best father.

It could've happened, if he was a normal man, or the best father.

But he wasn't.

He was my darkest angel and coldest day, my beginning without an end, a soft, delicate, yet cold creature who craved nothing but red and warmth.

I saw that then. I saw my father in his true form, his smile, his happy eyes. It was only when his teeth were sunk into somewhere on a fragile woman's body and only when the life was draining out of her and into him. It was only when they, for a moment, became the same dark creature and fragile woman, when their blood and their minds were shared and cold and wrapped in ecstasy.

And then he saw me in my true form, as I had seen him, a scared little boy who thought he was the world, a fragile thing like those women and without arrogance or contempt. A boy who was suddenly without a father and with a memory to haunt him for eternity. A devil now sat forever on his shoulder that would crawl into his head through his eyes and take over the small fraction of a normal boy that was left.