Smash!
Charles was startled out of a dream, a terrible dream. In
it his father came back and-
Don't think about it, he thought, and immediately tried to
block out the thought, but the images came through as
vividly as always.
His father hitting and humiliating him when he was a kid
had been bad, his being decapitated in a work accident had
been worse, but the dreams, oh the dreams, they were somehow
the worst of all.
He couldn't escape from his dreams.
He suddenly remembered one of the worst beatings (one of
them? The apotheosis of them all) his father had given him.
Charles had walked into the house, happy and unaware of the
mud on his shoes. He had filled the kitchen floor with mud
almost entirely before his father came in and started
screaming. Charles didn't have any idea of what was wrong,
but he still felt extremely guilty. His father had a way of
doing that to him.
He picked up a kitchen chair and, while Charles was
screaming "no, please, no", he broke the chair on the table
and started hitting him with one of the chair's legs.
Charles barely came out alive from that one. And on top of
all that, his father made him pay for the broken chair out
of his allowance. He had been eight years old at the time.
After that, he stopped kidding himself that he still loved
his father. He didn't.
He'd like to believe that the doctor and the nurses at the
hospital really bought the story about falling down the
stairs, but he guessed they just saw so many cases like this
every day, and after a while just stopped caring. Besides,
it was 1955, and people still thought that what went on in a
man's house behind closed doors was his business, and his
business only.
"Enough", he said out loud, his voice scared and trembling
but still soothing. "Now, what was that noise?" he kept
talking to himself as if it were completely natural to be
talking to yourself at 3 am. "Part of the dream, perhaps?"
He didn't think so. It sounded as if it came from the
bathroom, so he turned in that direction.
He smelled a faint fragrance form behind the door. One of
his crystal perfume bottles must have fallen, pushed by a
breeze, perhaps.
There can't be any breeze, his mind's voice protested, you
closed the window just like every night in the last two
weeks.
Ah, shut up.
The door was ajar and the light on, like every night
lately.
Well, what are you waiting for? Another voice inside his
head asked, either go back to sleep or check it out, but
don't stay here. "All right, all right", he murmured and
swept of the blanket. "I'm going".
On the way he looked out the window at the little town,
his little town, of which he owned so much they might as
well call it 'Charlesville'.
It was a lovely spring night, dark and peaceful, and that
made him forget the dream at last.
He got to the door and pushed it open, looked right to the
sink, forward at the tub, and finally left to the toilet.
There, he stopped, his mouth gapped as much as it was
possible.
One of his little crystal bottles was broken, but that
wasn't all. Oh, no, it wasn't all!
Beside the broken crystal there were feet, and just above
them there was a body in a blue overall on which splotches
of red paint had dried and now looked like old blood.
He recognized the overall. He had seen it every morning for
eleven years. It was his father's overall, the one he went
to work in every day and washed once a week. He had lived in
that overall throughout Charles' life, it seemed. He had
died in it, too.
He kept looking upwards and upwards, not wanting to do it
but needing to see it just the same.
He saw the strong arms, which, surprise surprise, held a
broken chair leg, the ever-widening stomach, the slightly
slumped shoulders, the firm chest. It was all very familiar
to him, as if his father had been alive these last thirty
years and he was still eleven.
He got to the head and cried out in surprise. He had
expected it to be gone, but it was there. It looked exactly
the same as it had looked thirty years ago. In fact, he
looked the same, except...
Except the head was slightly askew. A little, like a
picture someone hanged on a nail but didn't exactly get it
right.
"Dad", he whispered, and then realized that it was the
first time in his life that he had called his father 'dad'.
It had always been 'father', respectful and emotionless.
His father grinned his big and hearty grin.
"This is a dream. You're dead!" Charles said
conversationally, which was pretty strange since his mind
was screaming the words at his father. "Aren't you?"
Two different thoughts were repeating themselves over and
over in his mind, one mingled in the other. One was I'm in
shock, and the other one was I'm dreaming. The two
thoughts came one over the other, shutting each other up, as
if fighting for Charles' approval.
His father shrugged (how should I know, the shrug seemed
to say) and then took a step forward.
"It's a dream, it has to be a dream, please let it be a
dream", the shock had gone away, and total terror had come
instead, and now he was mumbling and whimpering, not
conversational anymore, but completely terrified.
Charles suddenly felt a strange feeling inside him, a kind
of draining feeling.
He felt his life's fears slowly diminishing in his head,
all those idiotic and meaningless fears every person has.
Not being popular, not getting good grades, never getting
married, not having enough money, and all the rest of them.
His life was shrinking in his mind. His first million, his
hope for a hundredth million soon (three more to go), love,
hate, hope, desperation, they were all a flea on the planet
of this feeling, which was pure and outright terror.
It wasn't something as complex as fear of death, it was the
simplest fear of all. Not of something that may await in the
future, or of having no future. This fear was strong,
enormous, instinctive, with no rationality whatsoever, but
most of all it was here and now.
He screamed.

In the little town, which might as well be called
'Charlesville', nobody heard him.