Read Online As I Die Lying by Scott Nicholson - Free Book Online Page A

House with a window to
the world.
    The thing-with-the-knife raised its arm.
    I could only watch in
horrible fascination. I was used to Mister Milktoast taking over,
but he was nowhere around. Was this my arm lifting, throwing a sharp
shadow on the wall? Was it my bones and muscles that had flexed themselves into
revenge? Was it my eyes Mother was looking into, her own eyes as wide as Jesus
plates? Was it me plunging the knife into the meat of Father's back with a
chicken-soupy sound?
    Father was so intent on his artistic
toe-tapping that he didn't register the metal intruder that had
found a home between his shoulder blades. He froze, his right leg
raised in a victory jig, his boot poised for a dramatic climax to
his love ballet. It became his swan song, the culmination of years
of dedicated practice.
    He spun, all grace forgotten, his sewer eyes
spinning wildly in his head like slot machine reels trying to line
up Lucky Sevens. As he fell, his mouth formed questions that had no
answers. Just before he landed, driving the knife completely
through his chest to plow through his splintered rib cage, his eyes
stopped spinning long enough to lock onto mine, and in his last
slippery moments he recognized his executioner.
    Or so he thought.
    He lay on his back, a crimson gurgle rising
from the black depths of his throat as his esophagus sucked madly
for air. Mother screeched but had no energy to rise. The
thing-with-the-knife that was me watched Father's final discoveries
march across his features in a platoon of twitching facial
expressions. Father found cold sobriety, he found betrayal, he
found agony returning like a karmic boomerang bouncing back
threefold. And if he searched for God and salvation and redemption,
he must have come up empty.
    If indeed the thing-with-the-knife was me,
then what happened next was entirely the thing's own actions. As
Mother watched, slipping into the feverish cold of shock, the
thing-with-the-knife rolled Father over and yanked the slick knife
handle out of his ruined flesh. Then the thing hacked at Father's
bootlaces, scarring the leather, screaming and frothing in search
of socks. Then the boots were off, flopping over, impotent.
    And that's where I found myself when the
thing gave me back my skin and bones. The thing shambled off to the
Bone House where Mister Milktoast lived and where I had been
briefly imprisoned.
    "Richard," Mother moaned. "Lord,
no...no...no..."
    Her voice trailed on with her mantra of
denial as I looked down at the bloody boot I held in one hand and
the butchering steel shaft that I held in the other. The rich
crimson sauce coagulated, turning a crusted red brown as it cooled
and dried. I blinked in the soft glow of electric light bulbs as if
I had just come back from a journey to the blackest corners of
night.
    And I was standing over my father's
corpse.
    And Mother was trying to stand and my own
legs were gelatin and Father's legs were bloody noodles.
    Mother took the knife from my hand and looked
into my eyes and held my chin as if she were scolding me for
sneaking into the cookie jar. Her eyes shone like stones in a creek
bed.
    "Listen, Richard. Here's how it
happened."
    How? I had seen, hadn't I? I was there.
    "It was me ," she said. Her voice was cold and
metallic, like the knife. "I killed him. I...got tired of him
beating me...I was scared he was going to kill me..."
    No, Father had wanted to kill her slowly, not
all at once. Her sudden death would have robbed him of a reason to
get up in the morning. Their dance had been scripted from the
beginning.
    "Listen now, baby," she went on, and sobs
crept into her words. "When the police come...you don't know
anything, okay? You were in your room and you heard a fight and
came out and saw him dead...you got blood on you when you took the
knife from me turned him over.”
    And the tears broke free, running down her
scared face. And fear fed her mind, threw fuel on the flames of
panic. I nodded, numbly. I wanted to be gelatin