Page 163 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

voice, a single word broke through the static of sobbing—
“mother.”
One memory overtook another as the hallway I walked
distended and became the muddy tunnel of an underground
maze. The rain had stopped, and the monstrous shadows
were replaced by the sounds of titanic things digging just
beyond the hewn dirt walls of the burrow. The tunnel
eventually concluded with another small, untidy room,
replete with another menagerie of corpses—except these
bodies had been far more brutalized than the ones prior.
Still, the vacillating voice was beyond my reach.
The next door opened into an even smaller space—the
bloodstained and corpse-strewn innards of a ruined RV.
Through a filthy, cracked window, I could see the figure of a
man on his knees, crying, pleading to someone. Clearly, this
was Marvin, minus his monster, covered in his now signature
stitches and staples. I could see a woman’s slender, delicate
shadow falling across him. He was begging the woman—
who I took to be his mother—not to abandon him. I bent
lower to get a better look at the woman through the window.
My breath vanished. The woman was my own mother.
If I’d only seen her smile, I would have known her. I
would have remembered how it lived beyond her lips, and
how the sweetness of its red glow always put the taste of
honey in my mouth. She began to recede slowly into the
shadows of the forest behind the RV. Marvin chased after
her, collapsing to his knees in the mud.
As she merged into the darkness of the woods, I heard
her speak to him. “The end is yours to keep, now. Cherish
him, my son.” She called him son, but I knew this man to be
no brother of mine. He was something else, though I had no
idea what.
Her eyes blossomed at the touch of the shadows, as if like
the moon, they were meant to be viewed exclusively from
a position of darkness. Without thinking, I plunged deeper
into Marvin’s memory, hoping to catch a final look at my
166 | Mark Anzalone