Word of the Day: Spur

Usually just raising her voice would suffice.  He was a good son, and almost always did as she said.  But, he was a child, and children get scared.  And sometimes their fear becomes anger.  Heck, sometimes their anger is the thing they’re afraid of in the first place.

They’re emotional wrecks, children.  They want so dearly to be just like the people around them, but they have no idea why.

He’d never had to deal with bullies before.  Like his father, he was tall and broad.  His physicality alone was enough to keep the couched cruelty of his fifth grade classmates at bay.

Then he reached the middle-school, and the torment began.

Before then he wasn’t held to those standards-of-cool enforced by teenagers bigger and cooler than him.  His plastic lunchbox was never an issue.  Nobody ever used the word “gay” to describe his clarinet  or his embroidered Phantom of the Opera sweatshirt from the family trip to Toronto.  Girls had always been, well, girls.  Never mean, never caustic and certainly never violent.

Confusion set in.  Deep in his gut, his anger, his fear, and–not least of all–his puberty clashed into each other, creating a silent Hellstorm in his bedroom, the place where he’d sit in solitude every night after dinner, wrestling the anguish of being eleven and some how different from everyone else.

His father had spent the last week at a conference in Tempe.  Now that his youngest sister had started school, his mother had gone back to her old job working as an accountant for a local manufacturing company.

It was a simple request: watch your sister while I go to the store.

His resistance was entirely unprecedented, his screaming, crying, and limb-flailing unlike anything his mother had ever seen from him.

The commotion frightened his younger sisters, and their mother soon had an entire throng of crying children on her hands.

Exhausted and without her husband, his desperate mother grabbed his shoulders and lay one full-palm slap across his face.

Each of the crying children went still.

Silently, they got their coats, followed their mother to the car, and went with her to the store.

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