The Brevity of Chaos

I'm always driving in my mind.

It is my escape.

Take a look at yourself, my father says. He is hovering over me angrily, his eyes narrow, peeking through the shutters of his eyelids.

Take a look at you, he shouts. Eighteen hundred dollars for this semester, he shouts.

Failed, he shouts.

I am sitting on my bed, legs crossed beneath me. In the mirror on the back of my bedroom door, I look like a tree branch bending beneath a gust of furious wind.

I am quiet.

Eighteen hundred dollars, my father screams again. Failed! he screams. What to do with you, he says, shaking his head. His hair is like a shaggy dust mop. Little specks of white dot his thick black mop.

Suddenly my father is just a tall stick with a dust mop head.

I giggle involuntarily, and then he is hitting me, his thick knuckles cracking on my cheeks like a sock stuffed with rocks.

It hurts beyond all belief, and in my mind I am behind the wheel, a landscape of green spilling forth beyond the dashboard. Beside me, a beautiful girl. The top is down.

He is punching me now. I push the gas to the floor, and the mountains and trees flicker by like a movie on high-speed. The beauty beside me laughs and rests her hand on my knee, fingers lightly rubbing. It tickles.

The next fist puts me out.

#

I awake and I am alone, lying awkwardly on my bed. There are little dots of blood smattered across the bed sheet; little dots of blood that make a steering wheel if you connect them just right.

In the mirror I look like I have been beaten with the branch that I thought myself to be earlier.

The bruises are just beginning to rise. Beneath my skin, which is so thin it looks like cellophane, the broken blood vessels are clouding with purple and red. I look as though there is a volcano beneath my cheeks. My eye is a cue ball peeking out from a deep corner pocket.

I touch my jaw, which is throbbing incessantly, and there is a gash beneath the left corner of my mouth.

His college ring, the one he never takes off.

I wiggle my tongue, and there are two loose teeth in my jaw, two loose teeth itching to uproot themselves and dance down my throat.

I do not hate my father.

I do not like him either.

He just is.

#

It has always been this way. Always.

I am my father's plaything when he is angry. I am the focus of his anger, frustration, abuse, vulgarities. I am the child he does not love.

When I was six years old, my father took me to the San Diego Zoo. We were among a throng of streaming, screaming children and their mothers and fathers. My mother had been dead for three weeks. This I know only by the news clipping I have read time and time again after discovering it in the library archives.

My mother had been dead for three weeks and already there was a much younger woman living in my father's bedroom.

We were looking at the monkeys and I asked him, Daddy, is Louise my new mommy?

My father ignored the question, and I asked him, Daddy, did you not love my old mommy?

He ignored this one, too, and I asked, Daddy, do I have to love my new mommy?

I felt his knee hit my back like a bull, and I bounced forward and fell against the fence circling the monkey cage. He ignored me when I began to cry, and when we left that day, I couldn't sit back in the passenger seat of the car.

My father was completely ignorant of the entire thing, just blissfully driving the car and ignoring me. I wondered how could he be so happy?

It wasn't me, and it wasn't the good day we had.

I decided it was the car.

Ever since, I go for a drive in my head when I can't handle what's happening outside of it.

#

I suppose that it will continue to be this way.

My father will continue to beat me senseless whenever he comes home after a bad day, and I'll continue to wake up with loose teeth.

Maybe one day I'll get away, when I'm old enough.

Somehow, though, I don't believe he'd let me go.

It is in times like this, times following the assault I can never avoid, that I contemplate one day getting into that car inside my mind and driving it right off a cliff.

It is in times like this that I think of these things.

I'm always driving in my mind.

Jason Gurley work has appeared in such publications as The Adirondack Review, Palimpest Magazine, Morella, The White Shoe Irregular, The Paumanok Review, Littoral West, Legions of Light, Progress, The Woolly Mammoth, Electric Acorn, Inkspot, 8 Magazine, and Turtleneck, among others. He edits and publishes the literary quarterly Deeply Shallow (www.deeplyshallow.cjb.net). Jason lives and writes in Nevada, with his wife and cat.

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