Joseph only nine sat at the dinner table, conversation passing around, a muffled, undulating vibration of utters. “Don’t stare like that, it makes me uneasy, Joseph,” chided Joseph’s mother. The hum resumed. An hour later the table was emptied of its contents, except for Joseph, alone with his uneaten plate of food. The TV, flickering its wantonly swirling amalgam of colors onto his mother’s face. “Joseph, please, eat your food. I’m worried about your eating habits,” her distant voice languidly taking its time to reach him from the couch. His sister, all of seventeen, sat down across from him. “Hey, kiddo,” in her reassuring singsong. They talked and he ate.
Joseph hadn’t liked school since the kids began to make fun of him. They poked and prodded him with words sharpened by blissful ignorance. “Crybaby” the boys would jab, their penetrating and mockingly wide smiles, like jaws. Each clinging to their inclusion, girls, in their giggling gaggles pass by him, atypically hushed. “Yeah, he’s the one, the one that cried alone in the bathroom like a big baby” amongst themselves, but barely audible from the outside.
Joseph in his room, crowded by the darkness, lost in his imaginings. The doorbell cries out for attention. “Hey, kiddo” his sister affectionately, leaving the lights off. She takes her jacket and leaves. “I’ll see you later Joey.” Hers and her friends’ voices waft, beckoning, upwards through the floor into Joseph’s room. “What took you?” “Had to get my jacket from my brother’s room.” “Oh, he’s strange. Sometimes it scares me how weird your brother is.” And Joseph, listening intently, as if balancing his entire weight on one single twig in fearful anticipation. And his sister, her words forming slowly, then with gathering willingness, “Yeah, he can be pretty weird sometimes.” “Yeah, let’s get going.” Joseph’s heart dropped, like a stone falling into a lake—less like a lake than an indentation filled with jet-black ink for water, and the stone, falling to the bottom, curling up on itself in the darkness.
Joseph, turning to his mother, her silhouette eclipsing a chunk of hallway light. “You broke the mirror in my room today Joseph, you ought to clean it up now,” voice straight as an edge, though she layered it with a loud blanket of sweetness.
“No!” screamed Joseph. “I won’t! I wish dad was here, he would never make me do what you make me do!”
Her rage bursting suddenly through her self-control, flooded the entire room. “Don’t talk to me like that!” her sobs even louder than his screams. “Its not easy for me! Its not easy to do this alone, can’t you please try to understand…” Joseph was having trouble hearing her, her voice and all else fading, as if the world’s voice were being smothered by a pillowcase, and he became distracted in the silence that enveloped him.
Joseph looked up and to the right, saw the stars, friendly and welcoming, with bright, honest smiles. He decided he would rather be with them. Joseph left his room, floating upwards, upwards, still higher, and to the right.
Joseph stretching his eyesight, saw something approach as he drifted further and faster into space. As if from a horizon that couldn’t be seen and didn’t exist, there approached a colorful object. Jupiter flashed by, looking very much like his mother’s TV. It’s random assortment of colors whirled violently around in that confined space. He said out loud, Jupiter is the most beautiful planet, I’d like to go there. The planet whisked by.
Joseph, not disappointed in the least, kept floating. He left the solar system, the galaxy, and came to a black hole. It called him in, like a Siren, and Joseph smiled an angular, disjointed smile, and fell inward into the black hole’s embrace.
