Gritting my teeth in pain, I managed to slink off the bed and limp toward my bedroom door. My three dogs followed behind me, whimpering with concern.
"Dad!" I shouted.
I needed him now more than ever. I felt broken.
Well, my leg felt broken — the blinking eyeballs registered in my brain as dry and irritated. Yet I couldn't see with them. Not yet, anyway. All they brought me was panic and suffering.
"Kev?" His hoarse voice sounded muffled coming through his closed bedroom door. I dragged my leg, one hand behind my knee and the other pushing against the cold hallway wall, and stepped up to the door. "What's wrong, Kev?"
Grabbing the handle and nearly falling over, I got his door open, and my seeing eyes met the light of his lit oil lamp. His gaunt face scrunched when he tried to take in the sight of me. When his gaze traveled down to my right leg, he paled.
"What the fuck is that, Kev?" He shrieked, thin limbs pulling in close to himself. "You have parasites!"
"No, Dad ..." I grunted, heaving myself onto the foot of his bed.
"Did you find your mom?"
My head pounded. All he had were pointless questions.
"I haven't, Dad — you said she left the reservation with her dad to live with him at an assisted living. Don't you remember? When I begged you for it, you wouldn't give me the address."
Guilt crossed his horrified face. I didn't let that guilt inspire any pity in me, though. He had chosen to withhold basic info about my mother. I'd had no clue she once battled with alcoholism, that my mom dated women in college, that in high school, she got in a car accident where her best friend at the time was driving and his head launched through the windshield ... Those were facts, stories, she never cared to share with me.
Basic shit, too. Like how Mom played chess competitively in college, broke her leg in elementary school, and spoke English and Spanish and French fluently ... How do you not tell your kids you speak multiple languages?
In my heart, I knew that I didn't need her, that she left for good when she left Dad and me. But if I wanted to see her, I could only find her by chance. And if my luck stayed the same, whatever dice I rolled would land on snake-eyes.
"Kev," Dad said, "you've been distant lately. I don't mean to guilt you by asking this, but is it because I have cancer?"
"No."
His upcoming death made me want to keep away because I could only feel stress around him. But that wasn't why I was sleeping more and dwelling in the shadows. His untreated cancer didn't make me work extra hours.
In truth, I found another farm to work at to avoid facing my remaining coworkers. I needed the money to help pay for our lives. It was me, not my dad, who won the bread and paid taxes.
"I can't explain my leg, Dad, other than 'my nightmares did this to me.'"
"I don't understand."
"You know what? I barely do. But I still have to face the consequences of this monster I see whenever I sleep."
I attempted to explain the evil man to him. I started with the time Liza and I were spirited away after taking our last exam; then, I described our distance and how when we met in person again, we experienced the identical disappearance from the "real world" into the mysterious castle of our nightmares. Dad stayed silent the whole time; he didn't know what to say, which didn't surprise me.
I told him about the people I had just met and the eye markings on their limbs on her head in Samira's case.
I saw nothing in his eyes but disbelief.
"Kev, you sound insane," he started with detectable hesitation. He reached out a wrinkled hand, aged beyond his time, and when I instinctively took it, I could feel the oils slick on his skin. I wanted to pull my hand away and go back to clutching my leg, but when I held him, despite his critique of my story, some of that sick sensation within my left through my arm. I couldn't read it on him, but I assumed those awful feelings went into him. The eyes protruding from my leg blinked shut, and slowly the bulbous skin sunk flat again into my calves and thighs, and the eyelids sealed shut, smoothing out.
However, what remained afterward was numbness and the tattoo-like constellation of eyes. Only now, instead of red, they were bright gold.
"Where did they go?" he coughed out, suddenly seeming sicker than before.
So, I thought, he absorbed my pain. That realization made me grimace.
"Not sure, Dad," I answered guiltily.
He couldn't stop coughing. I noticed blood on his sleeve.
"Let me get you a glass of water," I said, hopping off his bed. I had forgotten about my numb right leg and fell flat onto my face.
Through the fit, he couldn't ask if I was okay. I tried to get up, my heart racing in my chest. I smelled the dust on the floor and sneezed sharply, smacking my forehead on the wood.
I blacked out for a moment. When I came to, I didn't hear any coughs or wheezes. Luckily, my leg had regained some sensation, and I could pull myself up with the side of the bed, back onto my feet. My dogs had jumped onto my dad's bed and were lying at his feet, their heads down on the sheets.
"What's wrong, dogs?" I asked, only then glancing toward Dad. My breath caught in my throat, which closed up tightly, making it burn when I swallowed.
Dad's eyelids stayed half-open; his body went still. An icy, tingling wave rushed over me as I stepped toward the head of the bed and reached forward to feel his neck. I found no pulse.
My jaw dropped, and I reeled back.
Dead. My dad was dead.
And ... somehow ...
I killed him.