Watching you Bleed

Every family has problems we just know how to get rid of ours.

She had the crudest of tools I thought as she laid then out on the metal table in the basement. A tire iron, an old VHS, and a floppy disc sat on the metal table at her disposal. I could hardly wait to see what she would do with all these things but I promised to be quiet and just watch. Most parents would not want their child to see what was going to happen but somewhere in this marriage, those feelings of protecting me from pain turned into showing me how to stop it. She pinned up all of her hair so that her vision would be clear. She wore a white plastic jumpsuit and a pair of goggles. I wore some too but sat under the stairs watching through the spaces in the steps.

He made a sound, a moan of waking from pain. His wife, my mother had hit him with the tire iron in the back after the drugs that she put in his favorite lasagna had taken affect. He was powerless to defend himself. He was a man of great strength and stature and he used both on his wife of 16 years. Yes, he only married her because of me. I was the reason he had to ruin his life. I was the reason that he was angry all the time. I was the reason he had hit my mother because she got pregnant. He got her drunk and raped her but it was her fault because she wanted it. He wanted her to have an abortion but she would not and he forced her to marry her because if he could not have her no one would. I bet he wished he had never laid eyes on her now.

I watched her pick up the floppy disk. She waved it before his eyes with a smile on her face. She was eerily calm as she told him that she had copied all of the financial information and changed it all to her bank accounts. He tried to speak but it was hard through the gag in his mouth. I picked up an orange slice from the bowl beside me as she plugged in the VHS. The black screen showed no picture but that did not bother my mother. She just wanted him to hear the music coming from the dark screen. The way his eyes opened wide made me think that it was him on the tape. He used to play the piano in high school. He would sometimes play this tape when he would beat her to drown out the sound of her screams; karma demanded that he listened to it now. I picked up another orange as my mother picked up the tire iron. As my father's solo began she began raining blows down upon his skull. Blood and brain matter flew everywhere. Some even fell into my bowl of fruit. I just ate around it and continued watching. Her strength never waned, as the music grew louder when the rest of the orchestra joined in the performance. No one could hear his howling over the music.

After ten minutes, the tape stopped and so did my mother. Blood and bone fragments covered the plastic jumpsuit that she wore. I watched her look towards me under the stairs and smile. She set down the tire iron and then wiped the blood from her face. She walked from my father's bleeding and bloody corpse heading for the shower in the finished basement. I stayed under the stairs and stared at his body watching for signs of life. Even as more brain and blood spewed down his deformed face and skull, I still watched for signs of life.

We gathered all that we would need to go on the run. No one would look for him for about a month. He was a villain and now so were we. However, I did not care because my mother and I were together. She would teach me more about life and I would commit to memory everything that I have learned and seen. One day my husband would have to die in the same way that my grandfather and father had died. It was a family tradition, one that I was not about to break. I like watching them bleed.