Monday, August 29, 2011

Once in a Blood Moon

I was visiting my childhood home in Commerce, CA. Our family hasn't lived in that house since the early nineties, however, this past year, my mom and stepdad have moved back in. When I came in, the first person I wanted to meet was my parent's new son who was born while I was away living in Japan. He's already two years old, and this is the first time I'm meeting him. He's absolutely darling with a round, fresh face and charm that oozes out of him. In fact, when I was down on the floor, playing with him below the flat screen TV in the living room, I had a wave of jealousy. Why does my mom get to have this darling charmer of a child, when she said that she was done having children, yet I can't have one? I wanted to steal him. I was seriously considering it.

After spending some time playing and talking to him, I noticed two very particular things about this little fair-faced boy. First, that he was of above-average intelligence for a two-year-old child who was able to have full conversations while we were playing with the tiny cars on the floor. Second, he touched on a bit of macabre topics, wanting to crash the cars, cut open the cars with the jaws of life and chew on the bodies inside. I was a bit grossed out by his descriptive play and didn't think that was very normal for a little kid. HOW did he LEARN that kind of language, I wondered. I considered chalking it up to poor television censorship on my mom's part, but decided to go and talk to her about it.

I found her in the bedroom folding laundry and I lied down in a comfortable talking position, because I thought it might take some time to make my point. Surprisingly, all I had to say was "Mom, have you ever felt that something's not right with the baby?" She stopped folding and looked down at me, looking so sad and said, "yes, yes there is. He's got PSPT Syndrome. I didn't know what that was, but I decided to pretend that I did and figured I'd just Google it later, after she told me what happened. She didn't get a chance to tell me anything though, because somebody called her outside and she scrambled to look for her phone, then asked me to borrow mine. Her voice was urgent, so I just obliged. I didn't follow her out, and instead wondered what PSPT syndrome was, and was thinking about how I can figure it out before she came back to talk about it. I wondered what was going on outside, so I wandered out there.

I heard my name and my mom handed me my iPhone, and her face looked pissed off. Deciding that asking her what was wrong might warrant a long list of complaints, I decided to keep quiet for a little while. However, she couldn't hold it in. "Why do you have me listed in the Do not reply list? I was confused, and still am. I didn't know then, nor now what the "do not reply" setting on the iPhone meant, nor why my mom was added to that list. I told her that, but she didn't believe me. She wasn't yelling, but I could tell by her tone and facial expression that her feelings had been really hurt by finding out her status on my cell phone. As I was fiddling about with my phone, trying to figure out what that stupid "do not reply" check box even meant, as well as how to uncheck it. While messing around with my phone, I noticed the list of dialed calls that my mom had made when she was borrowing my phone. There were 2 calls to, and 4 missed calls from a Bellevue Mental Hospital. At first I thought it was some kind of trick, joke or mistake because I don't even think that mental hospitals are called mental hospitals anymore.

Anyway, I also saw a message sent to them, and I opened it. It had an attachment file, which I also opened. It was a help request form and had a bunch of boxes. It took awhile for my eyes to adjust to the format of the boxes and to figure out what it was. It was written in my mom's writing style describing an incident where the baby was found outside in the backyard fucking a cat. I was horrified and shocked by the words, so much so that I dropped my iPhone in the rose bushes, and I couldn't find it in the darkness, as it blended with the black soil. I again heard some commotion as well as cars parking in front of the house and I decided to find my phone afterward, and go see what was going on.

I walked in after my mom, some doctors who were dressed more like dog catchers, actually, they were wearing shirts that looked just like the Kuroneko worker's uniform.

I ran in behind the group and went the opposite route as them into the living room, since there's another entrance that wasn't blocked with people. As I was walking I heard the doctor shouting, "hey, how's the baby? I've missed the baby. Haven't seen him in a while." While he was saying those words in a loud, semi-condescending tone he looked toward my brother, Ricky, to guide him to the baby's whereabouts. Without a word, Ricky pointed to the closed closet doors. The doctor opens the door suddenly, and the baby runs out, holding a giant cooking knife, swinging it at the doctor, trying to slice his knees, shins, and stabbing down as if to pin the doctor's foot to the floor. Within seconds, the doctor successfully subdues him, pulls the knife from his grubby little hands and hands it upside-down to my mother who's standing by his side.

She takes it from him, and the doctor kneels to the ground, holding and calming the boy. My mom starts reprimanding the baby for his actions. "You're a bad boy! Bad boy!" And just as sudden as the child bolted out of the closet doors, my mom swipes the knife down very quickly as if to swipe it against his skin. At first, it seems like a very small cut. I'm extremely shocked by my mom's behaviour, of physically reprimanding the baby in front of the hospital staff. But suddenly, the wound is found to be bigger than expected. Suddenly the small line of blood leaking from the fissure turns into an all-out gushing wound, immediately covering his tiny body with blood. My mom, shocked by what she has done, grabs him from the floor by his neck, the way mommy cats do to their kittens. And that was the point, when I saw her running past me, with a dying bleeding baby in her hands, with me soooo sad for the baby, crying "don't let him die, don't let him die", when I woke up with a start.

My heart was racing. I was so scared. I felt vulnerable, that I could be stabbed at any moment, and wondered if I had locked the door. I woke Chu up. She quickly went back to sleep. I walked around the house, making sure nobody was inside, and I locked the door, and woke up Chu again. I told her the dream, but realized halfway that she went back to sleep again. I was so scared. So scared and bewildered, that I even considered Skyping home to my mom to tell her of this freaky ass dream that I had about her. It was 2;47am when I looked at the clock, which would be around 9-10am in the morning. But i decided against it, I had to work in the morning.


No comments:

Post a Comment