Page 160 of The Darkest Chase

I’m back in time, remembering the closet in my childhood home.

That dingy, worn-down apartment. A two-room rathole that didn’t even have a kitchen, just a mini-fridge and a foldout range top. The sink embedded in the wall had to double as a kitchen sink and the sink for the tiny telephone booth of a bathroom through the door just to one side of it.

Windows so grimy the whole world looked like mud. Bars over the glass.

Institutional as hell.

No curtains, so I’d tacked up blankets, tiny me standing on a wobbling, half-broken chair to reach.

Privacy was nonexistent.

My brother and I shared one little room, while our father lived in the other. Ate, slept… drank. He was always half-fused to that stained sofa in front of the TV, either drunk off his ass or on his way there, surrounded by empty bottles.

It was always so fucking cold in that place, even in summer.

It’s like the hopelessness of those dead grey walls sucked the life out of everything, especially me.

Maybe I was ruined long before Jet died and my life became one long vendetta.

Maybe I was ruined the moment our mother died and left us alone with that man, in that dead place, stealing more of our humanity into its awful walls every day until there was nothing left.

Except for the closet.

Barely taller than a coffin, just big enough to stand in.

No light inside at all.

Nothing on hangers or anything else, just a lot of old clothes piled up on the floor, like a standing junk drawer. For any other kid, it would’ve been a dingy nightmare.

For me, it was safety.

Because, weirdly, it locked from the inside and outside.

If our father was piss drunk enough, he couldn’t fumble the outside latch and pry it open.

That’s why I hid in that closet so many awful nights.

I’d make a nest in there with the rags and old clothes that still stank like sweat and God only knows what else. Sometimes Jet would hide with me, but most of the time not, and I think that was when I started to hate myself.

One of us had to be out there—visible—when our father came straggling home late at night after tearing it up at the bar down the street from the industrial building where he worked as a janitor.

As long as Jet was his punching bag, the monster wouldn’t go rummaging around in the closet for me.

So I’d huddle in the dark and listen.

I’d listen to our father’s slurring words, the banging, the clatter of bottles.

Listen to the meaty sounds of fists on flesh.

Listen to the sad, hurt noises Jet made as he tried not to scream or even cry.

Listen to my own deafening heartbeat as rage welled up inside me until I felt so full I could gag.

I could see it all happening, just from those sounds.

No comfort whatsoever, besides the old floppy stuffed crow crushed in the corner.

It was Jet’s when he was a baby, a gift from our mom, chucked in here and forgotten ever since.

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