Nothing like a family gathering to make the blood boil.
Nothing cools it down like cold-blooded violence.
Nothing cools it down like cold-blooded violence.
Snowglobe by Dana C. Kabel
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Adam watches the mascara run down his Aunt Linda’s fat
cheeks and thinks that she looks like John Wayne Gacy in clown makeup when the
white porcelain toilet tank cover smashes down on his head. His other aunt screams
at the top of her lungs.
Time slows to a crawl, like the hanging pause at the top of
a roller-coaster ride, when the cart briefly hovers at the rail’s peak before it
plunges down through the helix that makes him feel like his balls are going to
shoot up and fly out of his mouth.
Shards of white porcelain hang in the air like glitter
snowflakes in a snow-globe. A sharp fragment comes so close to blinding Adam
that the wake feels like a cold thread pulled across his eyeball.
The old maids, Aunt Linda and Aunt Vanessa, are huddled
together in the corner of the dining room. Their painted mouths show fear and
revulsion. He has never seen such emotion on their surgically tightened faces.
One of the masked home invaders swings a metal bat and
smashes the crystal topped serving table they are hiding behind. Vanessa
screams again and pounds a fist against the wall she is backed against, as if
it will open a magic hole for her to escape through.
The chunks of broken toilet tank cover are bouncing off the
floor as Adam’s knees buckle. His mother is wailing in the kitchen. Two of the
robbers are back there with her and he’s trying not to think about what they
are doing to make her scream like that.
They marched into the house so quickly after they had kicked
the front door in, that only one person had tried to stop them or get in their
way.
Adam’s grandfather was a salty old war vet who prided
himself in the exercise regimen he adhered to daily. The core activity of his
fitness agenda was a thirty minute bare-knuckled heavy bag routine that he had
pummeled away at since the long ago days of his Golden Gloves boxing career.
His knuckles were thickly callused and his deformed fists resembled a couple of
misshapen rocks.
He was a bawdy and proud old fuck who insisted on being addressed
as “The Colonel.” And, of course, he referred to himself in a third person
narrative.
Despite his lack of affection for the family patriarch, Adam
cringed when The Colonel had tried to charge the first two robbers at the
beginning of their assault. He was quickly disposed of with the butt of a
shotgun to the throat.
When The Colonel dropped to the floor, clutching a crushed
windpipe, the man who struck him turned his weapon around and blew a large hole
through the center of the eighty-three year old man.
“Hey!” Adam had screamed. “You didn’t have to do that!”
The killer laughed and kicked the side of The Colonel’s
skull.
Adam’s youngest relatives were playing in the basement that
had recently been finished into a game room. The sounds of a heated air hockey
battle immediately drew attention to the open basement door.
A fat thug with a shaved head and Homer Simpson mask went
down there. Adam gagged when he heard a shot followed by children’s screams. The
kids were marched upstairs then with a shotgun pointed at their backs.
Adam is near the end of his fall when the cellar door bangs
open and the crying children spill into the room. He doesn’t have the mental
clarity to count their heads and make sure they’re all there.
The floor that his knees land on is solid oak. The jolt
knocks some fillings loose in his mouth.
Multiple gunshots erupt in the room and then stop.
Adam face slams against the oak floor and his cheekbone
shatters. He sees Homer lying on the ground, bleeding. The eyes behind the mask
are staring at him.
A man in laced boots stands by Homer. The boots look like
the kind of new Red Wings that Adam’s mom buys his dad every year for
Christmas.
“What the fuck?” Is the panicked shout that comes from the
back bedroom.
The ownership of the new boots is confirmed when Adam’s
father kneels and rips the mask off the man that he just shot.
“You shoulda stayed in school, Tommy. This party didn’t turn
out the way you planned, huh?”
“Gotta get the fuck outta here!” Someone shouts. Two of the
home invaders run for the door.
Adam’s father raises his gun and fires. One man jerks and
keeps running with blood gushing out of his side. The other one isn’t so lucky.
He drops just outside the door.
The children are screaming. Adam hears his mom crying along
with her sisters. His eyes aren’t focusing right. His head is pounding and
there’s blood running down his forehead and dripping on the floor. The tank lid
must have broken his skull open. He’s really tired, but the burning pain keeps
him awake.
Tommy, the fat thug on the floor that used to play with Adam
after school, is crying and pleading for help. He looks at Adam with tears in
his eyes and begs him to call his father off.
Adam’s father pulls the trigger of his twelve gauge and
erases Tommy’s face. Then he drops the gun and walks over to his son.
“Oh God, daddy,” Adam whispers as the man who smashed him
over the head with the tank cover kneels down and rolls him onto his back, then
peels the mask from his face.
“You piece of shit, fucking junkie. After all the times I
tried to help you…”
“Daddy…”
“That’s how you repay me? You bring your fucking loser
friends here to rob your family at Christmas?”
“Da…”
Adam’s mother approaches. She’s crying and holding her hands
over her mouth. The edge of his vision is dissolving into a gray nothing.
“Oh, my boy,” his mother cries.
“This isn’t mine,” his father says.
