Pretending

by Jonny Voorheis

My brother died because my mother put him in the shed and left him there and he died of the cold. He could have left at any time, but he was very simple, that’s what my mother’s always said, and so he didn’t. He stayed there and he died. That’s it. That’s how he died. I suppose now, I could tell you why he died.

My mother wasn’t a drunk, or a druggie. She wasn’t even a bad woman. She was a bit simple maybe, a bit vulnerable. That’s probably why my father picked her, easy to bully. He was a mean bully. He liked to threaten people, he liked to threaten people that he’d hurt other people. He liked to tell people he’d hurt himself. He’d make my mother listen to all the horrible violent things he’d do to himself unless she opened her legs for him, right there in the kitchen in front of me and my brother. He liked to touch me too. He wasn’t interested in Adam. Adam was my brother’s name. If he asked Adam to do things, Adam would just do them, it was too easy. He liked to touch me, but he wouldn’t force me, he’d tell me all the things he’d do to my mother, unless I let him, unless I touched him. He’d try and get her to beg me to let him touch me, when he was doing all the things to her. But she never did, she’d just go limp and quiet and I wouldn’t like to look into her eyes at those times, because we both knew I’d let him in the end, but not until he’d hurt her an awful lot.

My father used to threaten to cut himself in front of us. He would cut himself too, with this big knife he carried around with him. That’s how he died. He was threatening my mother and cutting himself and he cut in the wrong place by mistake. He bled out on the kitchen floor. My mother sat there watching him. When he tried to get to the phone, my mother unplugged it. It didn’t take him a long time to die.

After school I got a job on the building sites. Just lugging stuff around mostly. I liked it for a while. But then we got a new foreman and I didn’t like him. He was a bully too, he bullied me a lot. A few of the lads that I worked with left when the new foreman came in. One of them, Terry, told me I should too, but I didn’t. I should have. Terry was nice to me. We got a load of new guys in and they followed the foreman’s lead, picking on me. I have big ears and I’m pretty stupid so they all started calling me Dumbo.

I used to go to the pub with the guys on a Friday after work and I enjoyed it. It was nice. I didn’t like it so much with all the new guys though, but when I drunk more they were nicer to me so I started drinking more and more each Friday and then if we went on a Wednesday or a Thursday I’d do the same.

Deep down I always hated Adam a little bit, because it seemed like he escaped it all. I knew this was wrong and I’d bury it deep down. But when I got drunk it would take me over sometimes. Not all times, just sometimes. And I’d come home and I’d shout at him. I never hurt him, not once, I never hit him or touched him or anything. But I would shout at him something fierce and he would always cry and then my mother would tell me to stop and I would shout and shout at her.

One night I came home very drunk. If my mother knew I was coming back very drunk she would hide Adam. I came back and shouted and stomped around the house. Usually I burnt out pretty quick if it was just my mother I was shouting at. But this time I shouted and shouted and stomped for hours and hours. I’m very big and my mother says I can be very scary when I get like this. It was very cold that night and my mother said later that she wanted to get up to get Adam from the shed but she couldn’t. She was too frightened of me stomping and shouting around the kitchen waving my father’s knife about. Even though I was never going to ever hurt anyone with that knife, I’d never touch anyone with it. I was just waving it about, pretending.

Jonny Voorheis was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. After working as a bartender and then as as brewer he upped and moved to Glasgow, Scotland where he is studying for a PhD in creative writing. He has been previously published with Sunlight Press, The Wild Umbrella, Ragaire, and elsewhere.

This piece was selected as a winner of our ‘Lies’ writing competition, and will be published in diceroll magazine issue II.