Heavy Heavy Hangs Over Your Head

TW: Abuse

“Heavy, heavy hangs over your head,” my father said in the sing-song voice we used for the game.

When I was five, I didn’t know he smelled like alcohol or sex.

His right hand was poised over my head, the left gripped the wheel of the Ford Ranger. I answered in the expected way.

“A feather?” I lisped over “th,” my mouth couldn’t contort to form the words correctly.

His hand fell on the top of my head and he put pressure on it for a few seconds. “Nope, a piano.” He laughed and ruffled my hair as I giggled.

Back then, he could do no wrong. That was before he locked me in the bathroom of a hotel room while he fucked a prostitute. It was before he would look at me with injured hatred shining in his eyes. It was before he blamed me for my mother leaving.

Heavy, heavy hangs over your head. I wonder if I’ll see the ridge of scars from where the doctors exposed his weak heart only days before. My hands are folded in front of me, my knuckles popping from the skin and turning white as unbidden tears threaten to fall down my usually stoic face.

I think of the time I told him the forked bar fight scars made him more handsome than anyone and reminded me of Harrison Ford. I can still see his bemused smile as he ruffled my hair.

“Thanks, Scooter,” he’d said. He stopped using his pet name for me after I started looking more and more like my mother each day. I know he’s never forgiven me for that. Perhaps he never will.

I can almost feel his big, work-roughed hands close around my small one when I was sixteen and half dead from a car accident in the hospital. My skin remembers his tears as they bathed my hands. He had cried for the only time I could ever remember. It is a time that is nearly lost to me, half buried in pain and drugs, except the feeling of his desperation against my skin.

Heavy, heavy hangs over your head.

I know I should leave and there’s nothing but hatred for me there, but I find myself in his room before it seems possible that I can be there. I barely remember the elevator. The antiseptic scent doesn’t seem right for him and the room is too glistening white for him to be in it. I pause in the doorway, knowing this is the time for me to turn around.

But he sees me. He looks at me, the hazel of his eyes seemed dull without the red web work of drunken bloodshotedness. I’ve never seen them look more beautiful.

My voice doesn’t work and I gulp past the lump in my throat to try and prevent the tears that boil up from my blood. I hear the rustle of the bed as he tries to sit up, and I press the button to raise it for him. His haunted eyes meet mind and my hands begin to shake, my fingers almost brush against the “call nurse” button.

“Hi, Scooter.” His voice is stronger than I expect. He seems smaller in the bed, lost in a sea of white crispness. It feels like a railroad spike has been pounded through me when I hear him use the name I haven’t heard since I was ten, when he spat “You’re nothing but plain,” at me.

“Hi.” I smile the best I can and approach the bed, dangling my shaking left hand over his head. He looks so tiny there, and I wonder if he was every as big as I thought when I was young.

“Heavy, heavy hangs over your head.”

“A feather?” he asks. I want to make it a piano. He never took it easy on me.

I tap him on the head gently. “Yup. Excuse me for a moment.” My voice catches on the last word, it seems lost in my throat as I head to the bathroom, my only solace.

I turn the faucet on full blast and watch the water blast out. My eyes lose focus of the droplets as they splash upwards, and I wonder if the tears will start like they did so many years ago.