“Walking Away” by Zander Zhang, XI: flash fiction

Walking Away

Every once in a while, in the middle of the night, we would find Tommy out of his mind, blacked out on the lawn chair facing the street behind his Aunt Gloria’s condo. We would drag him back inside to his bathroom, pat him on the back until he retched all the hurt out his system. After that, he always babbled something incoherent—sometimes it would be about his folks, other times it would just be about how hungry he was. Then we’d take him to his room, tip-toeing on all the wooden floorboards we knew didn’t creak, and set him down gently, so that Aunt Gloria wouldn’t wake up and see Tommy all messed up like that. Tommy’s parents were messed up too. He hated his dad, a dispassionate mountain of a man whose only sober day in life was the day they found Tommy’s mom Evelyn floating dead in a red bathtub back in April. Even at the funeral, Tommy said he couldn’t put the flask down. He would rather sacrifice his life than sacrifice his drink, and that’s exactly what he did. Two weeks after Evelyn died, his dad drank himself to death. Tommy didn’t go to the funeral that time.

That’s why he lives with his Aunt Gloria, Evelyn’s older sister. We all knew that Evelyn loved her son, but she was never really in the picture; she was too caught up with her job, and even when she was with him, you could easily tell that she had other things on her mind. His dad, on the other hand, was a real piece of work. Not to speak ill of the dead, but all his dad would ever do was sit on the La-z-boy all day and only ever get up to refill his cup. There wasn’t a drop of love in his heart and as far as we could tell, Tommy’s dad dying after his mom actually made his life a little better. In a way, it was like Tommy never really did have a family. We don’t think he really wanted one either. He always hid—hid from his dad, hid from the world. The world hates kids like Tommy, labeling him as a weirdo, throwing him into the dark corner of the lunchroom that no other kid wants to sit in. The world looked at him with scorning eyes, the way rich folks at a fancy event would at someone who didn’t meet the dress code.

The last time we saw Tommy was one of those nights he was blacked out on the lawn chair facing the street behind Aunt Gloria’s condo. We went to check up on him the morning after, seeing as we expected him to probably be feeling like crap. But instead of finding him knocked out in his bed like we usually did on mornings like these, we found his bed completely made, almost like he hadn’t even slept in it. So we went outside, and there we found him—squatting down on the sidewalk, tying his shoelaces, earbuds plugged in. We asked him what he was doing, and we received nothing but a middle finger. Without a word, and without looking back, he picked himself up and walked away.

— Zander Zhang, XI: flash fiction