Aliens on Aventine Hill

Creatures of Static [Part 5]

The walls of the linen closet boxed him in as he dreamed of a long-lost summer afternoon. The drywall was cool beneath his cheek as Gray leaned his head against it. His parents' voices echoed up from beneath him. He imagined he could feel their vibrations, reverberating through the house and into him through his cheekbone. Strange, angry vibrations, he remembered. Even muffled as they were, they landed like a punch.

Gray had long forgotten the words they'd said on this particular afternoon. It was one of an infinite expanse, an inconsequential cross-section from the years of TV dinners and unsupervised, solitary summers, though it must have been a Sunday. That had been the only day both his parents had been home together long enough to argue.

Eyes closed he listened to that familiar discordant cadence as his mind wandered along the old paths of their arguments. They always worried the same old wounds, said the same old words... Gray knew them all by heart.

He'd known he was a mistake since the time he was six, the result of reckless passion and Prom Night festivities. His mother had never admitted it, but when she thought he wasn't looking, her eyes had touched on him with a longing for her squandered youth. Plied with a little whiskey, his father had been blunter about it.

They'd loved each other once, his father had been fond of saying between sips. That it didn't look it now, but they'd loved each other once, there was no doubting that—and without you, he'd tended to tack on, no doubt it would've withered up and died a long time ago.

Gray was a cage, a trap that had ensnared them both in a hellish game of House. The whiskey and wistful sighs wore away at the fantasy, but he'd kept it up hidden away with the towels and bedsheets.

Until suddenly, somewhere between all the screaming and shouting and fighting, they found that they really had loved each other once, and then they loved each other again. It was a strange sort of love, but it was strong and supple. It was real.

The resentment—the avalanches of angry words—melted away into affection and resolution, and they took up their roles with renewed vigor. Mother was pregnant, and Father doted on her and went to work and made honest money, and when Baby was born, they made a perfect little family with no recollection of their troubled past.

Forgotten but for sporadic moments of sympathy, he'd become a stranger in his own home. He loved them, and his baby brother most of all, but somewhere deep and secret inside him lay resentment, buried in his flesh like a lead bullet.

And then, in some cruel twist of fate, life—or rather, death—had thrust Roman upon Gray the same way Gray had been thrust upon their parents.

Lying there half-awake, Gray wondered if Roman felt that same resentment. Did he bear that same guilt, that same ache, that same festering wound deep in the center of his chest? He fostered the same quiet independence Gray had at his age.

He blearily opened his eyes as someone prodded him again and found two men staring down at him. The one who'd been poking him—Officer Moore, he realized—blinked, twisted the corner of his mouth back and crossed his arms with a near-accusatory expression. He was close enough for Gray to smell the espresso on his breath.

"We're going to ask you some questions," he said slowly, "and this time, you're gonna tell us the truth."

* * *

Somewhere else amongst the dust and the mothballs, he scrunched himself in the back corner of the closet. The heavy hems of winter coats and rain jackets crushed his shoulders, pressing in around his small frame. Darkness smothered him like a blanket.

He glanced up at the naked lightbulb and then at the cord swaying above his head. He reached towards it and then stopped. It would make a little click as he pulled it, and they would be able to see the light from beneath the door. Too risky, Remy would say, so Roman swallowed his fear and pinched his eyes shut, the scent of cedar growing stale in his nostrils.