Savage by Nathaniel G. Moore

Dad’s pornos we’d watched recently. He knew I liked the one with the woman fucking the navy sergeant, her pink lipstick smeared from the task, her spit fettered to his long hard dick.
    On her knees, blouse open, long skirt compromised; she pumped her head while he ran his hands through her honey-blonde hair. Another one on the same clunking tape showed a guy getting a brunette ready with tons of fingers, including hers. (Her hands came from between her legs, entwined with his until all their fingers met inside.)
    We had planned out a dub session in the late afternoon. Andrew had assured me we’d have time to dub the whole thing once we took care of our own enjoyment of these hard adults and their acrobatic efforts. I arrived just before three and, with his eye on the front door, Andrew navigated us through the opening credits, the test dub and mouth over his hard dick. After it was my turn to come, and the dub was complete, Andrew drove me home, just in time for dinner, my absence barely detected.
    "There you are," Mom said, as I huffed in through the front door. "Your coach called, says there is a practice next Sunday at his place. He wants you to call him."

    Traces of smells and odours carved up the dinner hour: the red meat sauce browning and bubbling; the beef smog and faint cigarette stink lingering in the hall closet, muted by our coat fibres; the formaldehyde footprints: domestic ingredients were all caged inside the house.
    "I’m going to the liquor store, and then I’ll be back," Holly hollered. I didn’t answer.
    Twenty minutes later I heard the action at the side door, recalling a terrifying evening nearly a year ago, when I had accidentally knocked a full beer bottle from Dad’s hand when I energetically burst into the house to find Grammy, who was visiting.
    Dad was en route from the pantry when we collided. The next thing I knew he was screaming at me while I was on the basement floor picking up pieces of glass. The shouting attracted Grammy, who sat at the top of the staircase watching Dad admonish me for murdering his bottle of beer.
    It was obscene: the energy exuding from Dad’s angry sermon was God-like. The ridicule came out in bursts of sawdust and other alchemic symbols that I associated with him at the time. Strapped to an indoor lightning rod in the basement, I absorbed it all.
    And when my tiny Grammy took in the show on the top of the stairs, who sat down in protest of her grandson’s abuse, Dad lifted her up and carried her thirty feet back to the living room couch and continued his beer eulogy. All I did was come inside my own house, just as Dad was retrieving a beer bottle from the pantry. As the door sprang open, it hit his shoulder, sailing the bottle in the air for what felt like ten minutes, smashing into pieces in front of my bedroom on the cool, tiled floor, staining the drywall and sending Dad into an acidic fit.
    Too ugly to recall verbatim, he said something like, "I’ll put your face in it," as he pushed my neck down towards the dirty suds, tiles smeared in its foul dreg stench and my snot dripping dangerously close to the putrid-smelling liquid. Dad raged with adrenaline, acting as if I had murdered his unborn child, run over his dog and burned down his house, all on the same day.
    When I slinked my head up the stairs, Holly was cleaning her heels with a paper towel at the front door.
    "Holy shit! At the LCBO parking lot I successfully navigated sheer black ice, sloped driveway cross-wise, and just now our ice-covered steps in the pitch dark in stilettos without wiping out: the crowd goes wild!"
    "Why were you wearing heels?"
    "To see if I could manage them tonight. I think we know the answer to that one."
    "I think your laundry is done. The machine stopped mumbling."
    "It’s so nuts out there!" Holly said, blowing her hair from her eyes. "I’m freezing."
    I looked at the bags beside her stocking feet. "Whatcha get?"
    "Some rum for me