Overload

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The son ran and dived roughly into the arms of his sitting father. The official watched from the cell door.

"What did they do to you this time?" The father knew the boy liked his voice. Some wandering memory told him it had been rolling, deep, and slightly slurred, something his wife and son had always teased him about…but then the thought passed. He wanted to see his boy, to rest his eyes upon that soft, warm face, but all he grasped with his mauled, fleshy eyeballs was darkness. Reaching out in front of him, he searched for the boy. He seemed to just miss the boy’s torn t-shirt multiple times as it whipped out of his hand, and he wondered what was happening. He felt a light breath on his left ear, and through the silence he heard a little ripple, like a chuckle, or a giggle. But then he found him. He drew the boy’s little head to his chest, and inhaled his scent. 

Pulling away, he caressed the boy’s skinny arms and his rough hands. Again he asked if the boy was okay. He couldn’t hear himself speak, but he knew the boy could. His right ear hung useless from his head, but his mostly-deaf left one was still perked up for the boy’s response, or as best as it could with half of its flesh gone. But he heard nothing. 

He felt the boy thrust his head into his chest again, and those tiny fingertips pressed into the skin of his open forearm, forming letters. The corner of the father’s mouth lifted at their special language, but it turned to a frown as he deciphered the traced words. Mute. One minute passed, then another, then another. 

So, they had finally inflicted upon him the greatest punishment for his “crime.” HERESY, they called it. The boy shifted again, pulling at his father’s limp arm. He placed something in his hand. The father’s fingers closed around a soft, cold, damp object. He moved it around and around and around, rubbing its mostly smooth edges and one rough edge on one side. It felt like rubber. Coarse rubber. Suddenly realizing what it was, he flung it away from him. His white, blank eyes widened and his mouth fell open. At that moment, he couldn’t even speak for his son.

Tentatively, he raised two fingers. He was afraid of what he wanted, but the boy wasn’t. He felt the boy’s lips close around his grubby fingers. Tentatively again, the father moved his finger around the inside of the little boy’s mouth. He pushed against soft, bumpy, wet flesh, and confirmed his fear: he felt no tongue. For a second he wished the boy was just teasing him, playfully pulling his tongue back so that his fingers couldn’t find it. He desperately wanted assurance that it wasn’t that bumpy leather…thing, lying in the corner on the cold steel of the cell floor. 

And then the boy began to suck his fingers. Just like when he was a babe clutched in his dad and mom’s arms, he closed his lips around his father’s two fingers, making sucking noises that the father instinctively knew were there. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t right. 

After a few seconds, the boy stopped sucking, and the father’s arm dropped back into his lap. The boy remained still, as if waiting for a reaction. The father immediately embraced the boy, kissing his eyes, ears, nose, cheeks, chin with his cracked, rough lips. Then he cupped his boy’s face in his two, firm, callused hands, and with his thumbs smoothed the boy’s soft, wet lips. 

Vibrating through the metal corridor, the father sensed heavy footsteps approaching them. The boy pried himself softly from the father’s grasp. When the boy was free of his embrace, the father’s head suddenly snapped back. The leather toe of the official’s shoe rammed into his deaf left ear, and for once deafness stood still, just so that the ringing in his head could have a turn.

The blunt, leather heel kicked hard into the father’s gut. Then, directed at his already bruised mouth, three more kicks. But these felt like they came from bare skin and bone, from a weaker, faster, smaller foot. Finally, the blunt, leather heel slammed into his ear again. Darkness enveloped him. 

Sometime later, the father’s eyes blinked open, helping him in absolutely no way, but his mind regained the rest of its senses, as well as the racking pain. Like deafness and blindness, pain, in its infinite forms, had become a seemingly eternal acquaintance. Realizing where he was, the father felt around for his boy. Where was he? His boy always accompanied him. He could save him. But where had he gone? 

A smooth, gentle, and larger hand pulled at his arm; he repulsed it, feebly flicking his heavy arms at his accoster. Another weak kick bludgeoned his left eye. Pain no longer tore at his eyes, but he still fell back, dazed. The smooth hand tugged at his arm again, and he felt the familiar pain of the official’s penknife tear into the flesh on the back of his arm. Heretic 0-Last Punishment-Heretic 0. The father moved slightly towards the official, trying hopelessly to push away the carving hand, but the official completed the task. The father was now permanently labeled. To emphasize the worthlessness of his “plethora of heresy,” he knew. 

Hovering his hand helplessly over his fresh wound, the father thought to himself: 

I don’t know what else these subversive, brainwashing, demagogues could possibly do to me. They cower behind their thrones of power constructed upon insidious foundations of “human advancement” and “mental and emotional development”...Duplicitous despots who desire to drown the entire population in obeisance and silence––So sorry, heroes who wished to UNIFY all in mind and body––They start with the adolescent generation and cull its ignorant, innocent members; meanwhile, they dismember the mental opposition, the heretics who still had the sense to expose them for their deception and decadence…

He shook off his bitter, old words that had originally landed him and his son here in this shithole. His arm dropped to his side, the fresh carving still tormenting his flesh. And then the rough, little hand stroked his arm again, and the father relaxed. He slumped as he switched to an easier language. He closed his unseeing eyes, thinking back to that memory of his babe’s playful sucking, as those rough and tiny fingers smoothed the hairs of the topside of his bare forearm. The boy suddenly pushed himself against the father, a tiny dash of pain pricking the flesh of the back of his neck. Then he pushed himself away, slightly breathless. 

The father clutched both of the boy’s arms, and ran his hands down those bruised arms again, those rough hands. And in one of the boy’s hands, he felt a small plastic tube, a thin metal needle at one end. A syringe. It fell, and he followed. His mind withered, but not before registering the freshly traced message on his forearm. 

You save me. I join big world. Thanks. 

And it was then that the father wondered where the boy had learned all of these words. When he had been captured all those six years, six months, and six days ago, he hadn’t had the chance to give his son a proper education. 

Where had he learned the word “mute”? 

Two sets of footfalls departed, one light, erratic, fast and the other metronomical, heavy, sharp. Blood seeped from the carving. His concussed head collapsed back heavily against the wall. Yet he felt his heart convulsing with the words he could not speak. The ideas he could not share. The emotions he could not release. 

And the father died of sensory overload.

Christopher Fu

edited: Adz Morales