Nobody pays attention to Donny when he yells about fucking people up, but I do.<\/p>\n
From my perch on the stairs, I watch words fly out of his mouth, furious hard bees, buzzing for something soft to sting.<\/p>\n
Skylar says Donny is a clown and nobody should pay him no mind, but I feel the heat in Donny\u2019s voice\u2014hungry fire, greedy for air. \u201cIf he\u2019s such a clown, why does Ma let him stay with us,\u201d I ask, but Skylar laughs and says I\u2019ll understand when I grow up. But what does he know? He\u2019s been crashing at Josie\u2019s since Donny moved in.<\/p>\n
Ma tells me to hush\u2014Donny is a child, another little boy who needs her. I shrug. I\u2019ve heard this before. Glad he\u2019s not my dad. Donny\u2019s got a shadow around him, like the dark circle around the sun when you look straight up at it. It\u2019s just a matter of time before something bad happens. I keep out of his way, make myself real small. I stay on the top stair, until the day Donny catches me watching him and yanks my arm, twisting it behind my back as he pulls me down with him.<\/p>\n
Now I hide in plain sight, curling up inside Donny\u2019s words. I come home from school, slamming my backpack on the kitchen table, calling my teachers stupid bitches, goddam fags<\/em> if he\u2019s sprawled on the couch in the living room. He nods. That\u2019s my boy<\/em>. Ma stares at me like she doesn\u2019t know who I am. The worry darkens the circles under her eyes.<\/p>\n The night he comes home banging louder than usual, stinking of the anger and fear his body can\u2019t get rid of, Ma is in the kitchen, heating dinner on the stove, one hand on a hip, the other stirring the pot with a big wooden spoon. I sit at the kitchen table, pretending to fill out a vocabulary worksheet.<\/p>\n \u201cFuckin\u2019 cunts,\u201d he yells at the living room walls, his voice shattering doorknobs, and as he charges into the kitchen I look up. He\u2019s usually angry and loud when he comes home from work, but tonight\u2019s different. \u201cFuckin\u2019 cunts,\u201d he repeats, \u201cnobody listens, you stupid bitch,\u201d bullet-sized words hurled into Ma\u2019s softness. I push up from the table, trying to step between them, but Donny\u2019s already got one arm around her middle, the other grabbing the spoon. I reach toward him, but he elbows me out of the way. Backing into a corner I whisper \u201cSorry,\u201d hoping it doesn\u2019t sound like I told you so.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nobody pays attention to Donny when he yells about fucking people up, but I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":24360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[4503],"class_list":["post-23445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-phebejbsky-social","writer-phebe-b-jewell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23445"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24363,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23445\/revisions\/24363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}