Tuckered Out

Tuckered-Out
Danny stepped out of the shower and swaddled himself in a white towel. He hunched over and snuck up behind his victim. I watched as a devilish grin slid across his face, and he stretched out one of his thick arms.
Winding back with more strength than was necessary, he knocked his victim's deodorant out of the poor sap's hand. As the tube clattered to the floor, its owner bent over to pick it up as part of a knee jerk reaction. Danny, being the horrible, little goblin that he was, dropped his towel, took his semi-hard dick into his hand, and slapped his classmate in the face.
Everyone erupted into laughter.
"Ha!" one guy shouted. "You nailed that fag!"
I just frowned. For a group of guys who always touted their heterosexuality, they sure loved to hit each other with penises. Danny "The Menace" MacArthur was particularly bad about this sort of thing.
I've never figured out what it was about hyper-masculine dudes that made them want to terrorize everyone, regardless of how they were being treated.
Danny was the terror of Torpor Creek, West Virginia, a town that "God nestled between two mountains." That's what my grandma used to say, anyway.
Everyone in our dull, little town had a problem with the way Danny behaved, but no one did anything. We didn't have to. The problem solved itself when Danny put a rifle between his eyes and tried to headbutt a bullet. The bullet hit harder, and the biggest loser was Linda MacArthur's wallpaper.
I always wondered why he shot himself, and the town was never short on speculation.
One of his friends said Danny sent himself to Hell so he could show The Devil that a human was tougher than he was. I just figured Danny knew he was a shitlord and was bound to die drunk and alone.
Danny's funeral was perfectly fitting for a kid of his character. Not one soul shed a tear, and when the preacher went to sing "Amazing Grace," the CD skipped and stuttered so much that Porky Pig would have asked the machine to give it a rest.
Linda didn't stick around for very long after Danny died. She packed up a suitcase and took off, leaving behind a nice house and all of the furniture. Dad ended-up buying the place for a steal and we moved-in within a month.
I ran upstairs to see my new room, which happened to be Danny's old room. I wasn't worried about ghosts, spirits, or anything like that because Danny shot himself in the living room, from what everyone told me. Didn't bother me much because I never liked a lot of TV anyway.
What I expected was an empty room, but what I saw was a large, Maplewood bed. I beamed a broad smile and ran downstairs to double-check the living arrangements.
"No, that's your room and your bed, son," Dad said proudly. "Aren't you happy?"
"Heck yeah!" I shouted. No cussing in front of the parents. But on the inside? "Fuck yes!" was all I could think.
I'd only ever had a damn twin-sized bed. This thing had to be at least a queen, maybe even a king-sized monster. Mom called it a "sleigh bed," because of the curves in the wood. I figured that if it was good enough for Santa, it was good enough for me.
We went to Wal-Mart and picked up some sheets and covers, and I got more and more excited to go to bed. Never thought I'd be that excited to sleep, to be honest.
Night fell and I dove between the sheets, ready to sleep like the dead. Mom and Dad kept unpacking boxes, so their voices helped lull me to sleep a little faster than I expected.
The middle of the night brought a pressure on my right side. It was heavy and warm, like the air itself had been brought to life. My glazed eyes groaned and creaked open to see what was going on. The slow rise of my lids turned into a full-fledged burst when I spotted my uncle, Joe, cuddled up to me.
He put one of his doughy, swollen fingers up to my lips and shushed me.
"Don't freak out, Ryan," he said. "I just want to talk to you."
I nodded and tried to smile, but I knew my face showed more suspicion than he liked.
"You love your family, right?" Uncle Joe said, right before I nodded. "A big boy like you probably knows about all kinds of things. Do you know about how people show they love each other?"
"They kiss?" I managed to stutter out.
"Good boy," Uncle Joe said as his eyes flashed with intent. "Can you kiss me?"
I offered a quick peck on his nose and he chuckled.
"Let me show you how big boys kiss," Uncle Joe said.
He slid the covers off and started to move down the length of my bed. Right as his fat, sausage fingers grabbed my waistband, I started shrieking.
Mom and Dad heard and ran into the room. Dad was more-than-prepared to kill. He had a pistol in his hands and started to scour the room for something out-of-the-ordinary.
"What? What is it, Ryan?" Dad shouted as he turned white.
"Uncle Joe..." was all I could get out of my trembling lips.
Mom grabbed me and pulled me into her arms. "I know you miss him, but he's been gone for almost seven years now, Ryan," she whispered. "He's in Heaven with God's angels."
Joe Lilly was not, by any stretch of the imagination, in Heaven. That motherfucker assaulted me for years while he lived with us after his wife left him.
Aunt Karen kicked him out because he was bathing their daughter far too often, and each bath seemed to take longer and longer. Mom wouldn't have any of it. Her big "Bubby" could never hurt a soul, let alone a child. I was proof of the opposite.
He'd sneak into my room and try to "teach" me about love and maturity. In reality, he was shredding my innocence and peeling away at my psyche.
The day he died was a happy day. Just like "The King," Uncle Joe died on the toilet, straining his fat ass to death from a diet that consisted entirely of the happiness of children and red meat.
To see him back in my bed, and to smell his stinking breath on my face was more than I could handle.
Mom and Dad encouraged me to stay up as late as I needed to. They said they'd hoped it would help me grieve a little better. In reality, I just stayed up and stared at my new bed, hoping that the happiness it had brought me earlier could be rekindled.
The carving on the headboard looked like a tree with the sun behind it, and a root system that stretched-out and across the bed until it reached the four, tall bedposts. I hadn't noticed the word carved into the bed, largely because of my excitement, and partially because it was written in a weird way.
It said, "Yggdrasil" on the tree's trunk. I figured that now would be a good of a time as any to take to the internet and do some research. Ended up finding something about "Yggdrasil" being "The World Tree," that stretched to the four corners of the earth. I thought this was a cute idea for a bed, so I bookmarked the page with the intent to show Mom in the morning.
I ended up falling asleep in my computer chair, and woke up to sun poking through the blinds and into my eyes. Blackout curtains would help a lot, I guess.
Lucky for me, Mom and Dad didn't bring up Uncle Joe at breakfast, and I was happy that they didn't. The less that monster is mentioned, the more he stays dead.
The coming days were pretty much identical. I'd go to bed, have a nightmare about Uncle Joe molesting me again, wake up screaming, stay up all night, and pass out somewhere other than my bed.
Well, they were identical except for one thing. I felt myself getting more and more pissed-off over everything.
Bird chirps? I'd bitch at it. Food a few degrees cooler than I want? More bitching. It seemed like nothing pleased me.
Fucking Mom and Dad, moving me into that house that a piece of shit like Danny MacArthur lived in. Fucking school, not kicking assholes like that out. Fucking town, being boring.
Every day, that's all I could do, was hate. Hell, I even started hating the bed that I had wanted to love so dearly. All it did was remind me that someone hurt me, someone who was supposed to help look after me.
Before I knew it, I was trying to crack other kids' heads open just for a mean look or a second-glance. I felt like they knew that I was a fruit, a fucking homo who let his fat uncle touch his pee-pee for years.
Things came to a head when I had trouble waking up from one of these vivid nightmares. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my electric guitar, and swung it into the headboard. As wood connected against wood, I felt like someone had set off a neutron bomb inside of my skull. The ringing and shock waves in my teeth and temples made me collapse and sob for, what felt like, an eternity.
The commotion didn't stir my parents from their drunken slumber, and I didn't care if it did. I made my mind up in an instant. I was done.
It took a few minutes to find a sharp knife in the new kitchen, but I picked a good one. My adrenaline was pumping and, when coupled with sleep-deprivation, I was unstoppable.
The knife opened my veins pretty easily. I even did it the "right" way. Because my heart was pounding, I lost blood more quickly than I figured I would. The knife slid out of my blood soaked hand and clattered to the floor, and I eased myself back onto the bed. Maybe I'd finally get some rest?
As my eyes got heavy and the corners of my vision darkened, I noticed a quote under the trim of the headboard:
"For Man Has Done Harm to THE WORLD, Harm Shall Be Done to All of Man..."
I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, happy that I was alone for once. I hope Yggdrasil is happy, because I've paid my dues. Whatever "man" did to it, my debts are settled.