“I screamed at him to stop. He ignored me. I tried hitting him on the back. On the head. Even though I was supposed to be a better man, I still hit him, even though I told myself I would never hit anyone like he hit her. Like he hit me.”

“Dom—”

“Listen.”

I do.

HE THOUGHT his mother was already dead, and it was the first grown-up thought he could ever remember having. There was something cold about it, something strangely clinical, and it crossed his mind the moment his father had knocked him down to the floor, telling him and his mother that it’d be over before they knew it.

He doesn’t remember much about what happened next. Little flashes, maybe. Pieces, like the plate broken on the floor, and for this I’m thankful. It’s like his mind wanted to protect him from the horror. There were scissors in one of the drawers. His mother used them for the scrapbooks she used to make. He remembers grabbing them, pleading with his father to stop. His father did not stop.

He was told later he stabbed his father in the side seven times. Surely it stopped the savage beating. Surely it saved his own life, because his father could have come after him next. Surely he was a hero. This is what he was told.

He was also told it was too late to save her. This, of course, came much later.

It came much later because after he’d stabbed his own father, a thing he cannot remember, he was sticky. He knows he was sticky and it was on his hands and his face. His arms. His feet. Especially his feet. He tried to step, but it was like his feet were stuck to the floor. He tried again, and his foot came up, but it was sticky.

He looked down. There was so much red paint. It was everywhere.

It covered his father too. And the floor. And it covered the thing on the floor dressed in his mother’s clothes, but which no longer looked like his mother. She was painted too.

And it hit him then. His mind then tried to protect itself in the best way it knew how, by making him believe he was dreaming, that it was all a dream, and he should just go back to bed, and in the morning he would wake up and everything would be okay again, and he would remember this as nothing but an awful nightmare that would fade with the hours, and soon, he’d forget it ever happened.

It almost worked. Except when he turned to go back to bed, he slipped in the paint, and he went down on one knee and a little broken piece of plate cut the palm of his hand he used to catch himself. It hurt, the pain sharp. And he wasn’t a stupid boy. He knew he couldn’t feel pain in a dream.

If it wasn’t a dream, then it was real.