Slate | ✓

ONE | WILL

    Keep calm, for the love of God, just keep still. I try to negotiate a silent bargain with my body, waves of nausea electrifying my skin. Not now, not here.

    My father sits at the head of the dining table, four plates of half-eaten food scattered amongst discarded cutlery and used napkins. Above us, a hanging fixture casts warm light, emphasizing the silver hair around his temples. The smell of the supermarket lasagna has gone stale. My own meal is stranded far off my placemat, shoved away in disgust when my father began talking. "So, that's what I've decided. I want my son home. I want Charlie home," he now concludes, chalk grey eyes scanning the faces around him. The three of us stare back in blank confusion.

    Hostile silence is the immediate response. The kitchen clock, hanging behind me, softly ticks with the passing seconds. I methodically scrape my hand against the splintered underside of my wooden chair, the sharp pain doing nothing to control the tremor wracking through my fingers.

    Across from me, Athena settles back in her chair. My sister's scathing gaze picks me apart. "Will," she says, "Stop looking like you have a stick up your ass." She crosses her arms, manicured nails tapping a steady pattern against her bicep.

I don't respond, her scrutiny furthering my feeling of displacement. I fixate on the chair, where I can feel the edges of a hidden dinosaur sticker, illicitly placed there by Athena and I as small kids. I begin to pick at it.

"I'm sorry, what?" John blinks, seated at my side. His hand has balled into a fist, calloused skin sitting like a bomb beside his beer bottle, ready to detonate. "Victor," he addresses our father by his first name, "What the fuck? You've decided, but what about the rest of us?"

    "I need a smoke." The words tumble from my mouth. In an uncoordinated jerking motion, I stand up from my chair. Heat strokes down my neck, accompanied by the sense that an inner gyroscope has twisted the wrong side up.

    I've disrupted the balance of the room and the attention of the Slate family is crashing against me.

    Victor's hand, open palm, slams down onto the table. It shakes with the action, glasses rattling. "I asked you all here, I need you to listen. Sit down, William." The violence of his sudden action is accompanied by the bone-weary tone my father's voice has become.

    I jolt at the sound of my full name, but do not- cannot- stop. I fumble for the latch to the sliding door, leading out into the backyard.

    "Do you hear me, boy?"

    "Let him go." I hear Athena's voice, muffled and sounding bored.

    Outside, the darkness is crisp with a light summer breeze that hits me, ice against the heat of my skin. I trace the rough brick of my house as I turn the corner, unkempt shrubbery blurring beneath my feet. Dim light is offered by the lamp posts that line the adjacent suburban street, and I can barely see the grass that settles between my toes. I didn't think to grab shoes.    

    Leaning against the side of the house, I shake out my hands, roll my shoulders, and focus on my breathing. Nobody ever told me that my chest would periodically feel like it was collapsing in on itself at the ripe age of seventeen. So far, my brace-for-impact position has involved sitting alone, sobbing, and systematically inhaling cigarette after cigarette. I'm usually still dealing with the ugly aftermath when John wakes up for work just before dawn.

    I don't have any cigarettes, and I certainly don't have the bleary-eyed, fumbling sympathy of my older brother. I have the deafening sound of my heart beating in my ears, and the sour, decomposing taste of the words family meeting dissolving on my tongue.