Shades of Eva by Tim Skinner Page B

the verses I’d recited to her: 
    Two sons born in insane times—
    Similar in every feature.
    One thinks and dreams of things unknown.
    One dies and returns a
creature.  
    And then she added,  
    But, babies don’t die when they are
taken.
    They lay still, but they reawaken.
    Father and brother they will slay,
    And burn this place amidst I
lay!  
    There it was: a fraternal, predestined
vengeance by Eva’s two sons! A father and a brother slayed—and I’d
forgotten it.
    There was an awkward, tension-mounting
silence in that room as Amelia finished reciting that old,
half-forgotten poem. She waited for a reaction, waited for the
answer that almost never came, as if hearing those extra lines was
supposed to fan some fire in me. All it sparked was another sharp
twinge of pain in my ribs. My heart felt like someone had just put
a blood pressure cuff around it and was squeezing the hell out of
it. My ears were starting to ring, and the congregation of voices
in my head was starting to hum again, and giggle even, as they
were, no doubt, devising their next collective admonishment.
    “I believe Ully and his friend killed your
brother, and in so many ways, they killed your mother, too! They
shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”
    I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say
because I didn’t feel anything for anyone back home. I didn’t feel
much anything at all that night except pain, and a good bit of
thirst.
    I stared hard at Amelia. She was offering me
a chance at vengeance, or something like it, which probably had
another name. Maybe it was punishment. She was virtually handing me
the name of this killer friend of Ully’s, this rapist, but all I
felt was apathy.
    It had been a long time since I thought
about Mom, truly thought about her, so long that it was hard to get
a sense of her as a person anymore—as a mother even—as anyone much
more than a simple word: Mom. Had I fallen so far as to have robbed
my mother of her maternity, and dare I say, her humanity? Had I
punished her for dying young? Had I convicted her for being late to
the toolshed when I should’ve never been there in the first place?
Had I executed my mother by forgetting about her? Was I, even if it
wasn’t the most active form of killing, a murderer, just like she
once said that I was if I took my father’s side of things?
    All I could do was to shut my eyes and shut
Amelia out.
    I fell into a shallow, drug-induced,
poem-induced sleep again, and when I opened my eyes once more, I
was staring down the barrel of Amelia’s Beretta. 
    “I want you to reconsider,” Amelia said,
giving me a look of rueful indignation as she tapped the muzzle of
her gun to my forehead, and then pulled its slide back.
    I would have jumped backward, but I was
frozen. The slide made that loud locking sound; the kind of sound
that gets your attention in a quiet room in a very visceral way,
much like the unexpected roar of a lion might get your hair up on a
quiet night in the savannah.
    Amelia only smiled that coy smile of hers
and pressed the pistol a little deeper into the aching flesh of my
brow. I thought for a moment she was going to shoot me for being so
evasive, for being so apathetic. I thought, then, that maybe this
was her way of coercing the hometown kid to get his ass back home.
I could feel her depressing the trigger, and as she did so I closed
my eyes, as was my habit when someone held a gun to my head and
began to pull a trigger.
    Funny how someone could habituate to such a
thing—but I had. For a moment, I wondered just why that could
be.
    I wondered until I heard the trigger
snap.
    My head snapped reflexively to one side as a
click resonated in the room. I opened my eyes and then I heard
Amelia laugh.
    Who the hell shows up out of nowhere and
pretends to shoot you in the fucking head because you can’t quite
see the forest for the trees? And, amazingly, I came to an answer.
Fathers! Fathers, I thought, recoiling at that familiar, lucky
click