Flash Fiction - A pocket full of cruelty

“You had to roll a 6 to start.”

“For what, Dad?”

His face is shrunken in a way that makes me not want to look at him; the crape paper skin is hanging from his cheekbones.

“That dice game.”

“I don’t remember any dice game, Dad.”

He looks at me then and I hate the fact I still wither under his gaze.

“Well, I do. I’m not…” He wafts his hands around like he might catch the word mid-air.

“I’ve not forgotten.”

He has.

“Do you want to sit by the window?”

“What, so I can look outside but never go outside? Bloody prison, that’s all this is.”

“It’s a hospital, Dad.”

When Sophie rang this morning, she said he had shrunk and that I should visit today. After putting the phone down, I’d turned to Marie and told her.

“You don’t owe him anything,” she’d said.

But I do, don’t I?

“Senile,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m not senile. See, senile, senile, senile.”

I look at his bushy white eyebrows, so I don’t have to look into his eyes. In his eyes, I see the man he was. The taunts. The cruelty. The violence. And I see the thing that scares me most. I see a flicker of myself.

“I never said you were senile, Dad.”

He busies himself with the monitor attached to his bed. “Why do you keep me hooked up to this contraption?”

“It helps you. Monitors your heart rate.”

“Ah, you think you’re clever, don’t you? I know what this is.”                                       

Suddenly I’m exhausted and I long for my home and Marie and a hot cup of coffee. “Right,” I say.

“Punishment. That’s what this is. I knocked some sense into you when you were a bairn and this is your way of getting back at me.”

“Have you been eating?” I ask, the blanket has dislodged with his shuffling and Sophie was right, his stomach is concave and each of his bones are showing through the thin hospital nightgown.

“Of course I have. That girl. Erm. Poppy. She brings me food.”

Poppy left a year ago.

“For the head,” he says.

“What?”

“The 6. Fuck’s sake Shaun, keep up. You never had any brains. What was it they said to you at school again?” he hacks out a cough. “Shaun, Shaun, Shaun. Dropped on his head when he wo born.”

His memory is definitely selective.

The hacking turns to wheezing and then he’s gasping to get a breath. His bony fingers dig into my arms like steel rods. And, for a terrible moment, I think I could just do nothing. A few minutes and it could all be over and I could be free. The beeping from the monitors pulls me out of it and I call for the nurse.

She gives him something and soon he is sleeping.

“Beetle,” I whisper, hoping he can’t hear me. “The dice game was beetle.”

He doesn’t stir and I pocket this forgotten memory of his and stash it with the others. My collection of treasure.

I hope you enjoyed this little flash fiction story.