SandScript 2021

“Your father? About what?”
“He said she didn’t do it.”
“Do what? Where did all of the
blood come from, Benji?”
“I don’t know.”
“Benji, you have to know.” I lifted
his shirt to look for the source of blood.
There were so many wounds, slices and
scars, thick, pink, angry lines betraying the
secrets of Benjamin’s life. But there was
nothing new. Fear paddled my insides.
“Benji, did you hurt someone?”
“No, but she did.”
“Who, Benji? Your mom?”
“Velma. She killed the baby.”
I didn’t understand. I knew his
youngest sister was five. There were no
babies left.
“What baby?”
“Baby Finn. He kept crying and
crying. So she put him in the hamper to
make him stop. Or so that she didn’t have
to hear him anymore.”
I took a breath. But there was not
a drop of air left in all the world to draw
from.
***
Benjamin always asked me, which
was less forgivable — to be beaten by
someone crazy or by someone perfectly
sane?
I could never comprehend that.
How was either forgivable? How was
one better? But to Benjamin, it was a
rhetorical question. He had already
charged, sentenced and convicted
the guilty — his father. No matter what
Benjamin’s mother did to him, she was not
responsible. His father, on the other hand,
was a monster with a brain and a will, able
to spoon out punishments far worse than
anything physical — incessant, calculated
beatings that butchered Benjamin’s
being.
His mother had charged,
sentenced and convicted herself. After
realizing what she had done to baby
Finn that day, she locked herself in the
bathroom. Benjamin broke in the door,
only to find his mother lifeless, lying in a
demise of razors to wrists.
***
I see him on the streets at times,
a resident to the concrete and abyss,
homeless and incoherent, often talking
to the silhouette of himself, an erasure of
existence that everyone else walks right
by. For all the years Benjamin endured
horrid, severe scrutiny and attention as a
child, he was paid back with invisibility in
adulthood.
“Hi Benji,” I stop him and try to
remind him who I am, of our friendship,
but his eyes are always void of any
recognition of me. Of us. Of him.
“You have to do the laundry,” he
says to me the first time I see him. He
says it again, the second time, the third. I
wonder if maybe he does recognize me.
If I remind him of that day we switched
clothes. Or the day he told me of baby
Finn.
I give him some money and offer a
hug. He always accepts the former, never
the latter. I wave good-bye and turn
away from my friend, that young boy who
had no fault in life except to be born, who
suffered far too much, whose then only
choice was to fade into the watercolor of
oblivion.
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