Short Story-Understanding Craig

Monday evening and still looking for an agent, still submitting queries, and it's as if the better I get at actually writing, the more I can't be deterred. More submissions tomorrow.

Back to business...

this story was written in 2007 and it's called "Understanding Craig." There are a few major themes and it's a pretty interesting story.

email me at theblackkafka@hotmail.com with any comments or questions

***warning, this story has a rape scene***






"Understanding Craig"


Part One

For a while, if I woke up in the middle of the night and felt three feet of cold sheets beside me, I’d go slowly to the door so I wouldn’t let him know I was awake and I’d look through a small crack in the door at Craig. His body would be lost in the darkness with his head shining under the kitchen light as he held a burning Newport over the ash tray. Sometimes he’d be sweating; sometimes he’d be crying. Every once in a while he’d let out a sigh that sounded as though his brain were in pain. Sometimes, when I wasn’t afraid, I’d go and get a glass of water or another blanket if I was cold and he’d never turn around. He just stared across at the other side of the table as if there was someone sitting across from him, explaining life.

He would almost always start the night in bed with me, and something would bring him to the kitchen. I never bought his new thing for smoking cigarettes. I’d smoke most of them anyway, and when he smoked, they mostly just burned and ashed and he’d look uncomfortable holding them. Before he went away he’d never even wanted to see anyone around him smoking anything, then he came home and not only smoked, but allowed me to smoke around him which before would most certainly start some ridiculous argument about how only whores smoked or something like that.

He usually kept quiet for the entire night, especially after those first few nights when things with him were just strange. He’d come home from work and raise his baseball cap from his bald head and give me looks the way he would when we had first met and I was making him wait. Really, he didn’t have to wait at all. That first week we both sat in the bath after work cleaning every inch of each other as if the two years had been spent running through dust storms. He looked at my body as if he didn’t have skin of his own when he moved the washrag across it. He kissed me as if his mouth were holding me over the edge of a cliff. He lotioned my entire body, paid special attention to the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands, and fell asleep staring at my body, seeming satisfied at the idea of being near a woman. He hadn’t had sex with a woman in two years, and he was more sexual than he had ever been; only he wouldn’t have sex with me.

We had a birthday party for his nephew Marcus a couple of months after he came back and it became more of a homecoming party because of all of the people who were happy to see him home. Those things are dangerous for people when they’ve just gotten out though. You’d be amazed at the amount of rumors people can start about you and your woman, and your mother and your brothers and sisters during two years of incarceration. Now Craig, when he was nineteen or twenty might have gone to jail and came out when he was twenty-two and had he been to a homecoming party, someone from the neighborhood might have whispered in his ear that Randy from building 217 tried to rob his mother or the someone had seen me with fat Jose from the hill in the park, only my head was down low in his lap, and he would not have cared about how many years he got for each bullet he shot into the crowd at the party to settle the score.

Even though Craig would probably be hearing all of the same things, I would have imagined that he’d become the type of man who figured that it was his fault that the neighborhood was stepping on his family and would try his best to work out his family’s problems behind shut doors and in whispers. His problems with me though almost didn’t save themselves for a stare down at opposite ends of the kitchen or a screaming match in the bedroom. He said so many terrible things to me that at one point I found myself smacking him in enraged shame over the bowl of potato salad his mother had made. When the party had ended, he was upstairs and in the shower before everyone could find a place to continue the fun and when I walked into the bathroom to wash my face while the shower was running, it didn’t even seem as though he’d flinched or fidgeted when his mind had been jarred by the discovery of another body through the dank and draping steam. He turned off the shower and snorted with his mouth closed like those big hogs who charge on other animals, pulled back the shower curtain looking directly at me, stepped out of the shower without drying himself, and pulled me by the hair, looking into my eyes with the look he always got when he wanted to kill someone he’d hated anyway.

Every time I’d try to speak, he’d pull tighter, only loosening the tension when my neck was bent too far back and he knew I couldn’t breathe. His other hand found its way to my chest and I would have assumed that its next place would have been around my throat, but it began to pull down my tube top, exposing my breasts which were one of the few things on my body that had gone untanned by the sun that day. I let out a feisty “no Craig” that might as well have been silent. Still unable to move my entire body from the pressure pulling at my hair, my tube top was at my waist, above my skirt which if Craig really wanted me naked, wouldn’t be that difficult to remove. I remember thinking that if Craig had wanted to have sex with me, it was more his style to kiss me until he could stumble upon the actual act, but I could see in his movements and feel in the tension of his grip, now at my scalp, that he was more angry at me than he had ever been.

When I tried to fight back, he paused, giving me a look that questioned my audacity, and used the hand holding my hair to drive my forehead into the mirror, cracking the glass and leaving a blood-covered bruise over one of my eyebrows. He pulled me slowly enough to walk by my hair to the bedroom as I yelped in pain and threw ineffective punches at his ribs and shoulders. With his free hand, he tore at my clothes, bouncing and jerking my body in the direction of each ripping pull, and in piercing pain if one of those pulls was in the opposite direction of the grasp he had on my hair.

My face bleeding thoroughly, the blood now mixing with tears, he used my hair to slam my dirtied, wet face down into the bed, probably just as hard as he might have punched one of the men he thought I’d been with while he was away. I was bent over and although writhing in pain, crying and bleeding profusely, and doing my best to fight him, I wasn’t going to let him position me in a way that he could enter me. He was using his enormous black hands to move me to him, and I couldn’t let him do it. He pressed my entire body down and I was stuck to the bed with his hand pressing my face into the mattress, and he did it anyway.

We didn’t even touch for a month and a half and it took until the weather got cold again for me to stop allowing my body to jump and quiver when I felt him enter a room, but he slept. He slept the way he did when we had sex every night. The way he did before he went away. Once I’d felt him kiss me on the forehead in the middle of the night, but I couldn’t bring myself to let him know that it made me feel good.


Part Two

Doing like they do in movies when the mother tells everyone watching that “I always knew he was going to be a special child” would be silly for me to do, mainly because it’s a little difficult to tell how special your child is when you’re trying to pay the bills. If Craig was fed, and I was paying the rent, then there’s a good chance that I was exhausted from completing those tasks. I guess I had more conversations with him at the foot of my bed while I was fast asleep and he was yapping away about school or some girl that liked him than a mother should have with her son, but I figured most of the time that he just needed an ear.

I could feel him kiss me on the forehead and I would vaguely hear him whisper “I love you mommy” through a sleepy daze. I never knew what he did in his room at night, but I know that he kept the light on and he was always too tired for a seven or nine year old before school. I’d still though, never known a boy who loved his mother and showed appreciation like Craig. He brought me flowers once when my sister, his aunt Jackie, had pneumonia just because I was working two jobs, looking after Jackie at the hospital, cooking little silly meals for him, and keeping a clean house, and I knew this because that’s basically what he wrote on the card in his little perfect grade-school cursive. He once tried to steal the lady next door’s fur coat when he was eleven and when we all asked him why, he told us all that it would have looked better on his mommy because she worked harder. He was exactly the type of boy I begged him to be.

The teenaged Craig had this passion for justice that I don’t think I could ever come to grips with. He wasn’t rebellious, I mean, he was my son, but he seemed to find ways to retaliate when no one was looking. I used to ask him if certain things made him angry, and he’d say “no” and I’d start little speeches about fighting battles and taking losses and he’d look down on me in bed with a look on the middle of his brow and on the corners of his mouth of a man who was going to settle his score in the most disrespectful way possible and in the middle of the night while everyone was dreaming.

Once, when he was twenty-four and not listening at all to me about getting out of that damn neighborhood, he’d heard that one of the guys in the building had said some ridiculous thing about that chick he started dating, who he’d already done a good job of trading me in for in a few years time, and silently, he wanted to kill the guy, but he’s still never said that to anyone. What he did say in all of those letters from the penitentiary was that he had always wanted revenge.

He wrote to me in one of the most believable letters you might ever read from jail that he went to the guy’s house to you know, scare him a bit. He’d take the guy’s girlfriend’s lipstick and use it to write something stupid on the bedroom mirror like “I know where you sleep motherfucker,” or “guess who was here.” Craig said that if the guy was the paranoid type who thought he slept too heavily that he’d be afraid that his girlfriend was raped or his shoebox stash was stolen and do his best to leave the neighborhood. Craig of course would bring his gun on a trip like that, but this was the only time he’d ever have to use it, when he walked into the apartment and found the guy making love to a woman on the couch, and hastily drew his gun and shot when he was startled at their screams.

He served two years in prison only because he stared that impulse to use his drawn gun in anger in the face and just wouldn’t. He had realized where he was and he ran down the staircase and through the lightless night and was only caught by the police because he refused to put anyone in any legal jeopardy for hiding him. Craig Washington, my dear son, was even honorable in handcuffs.

He kissed me on the forehead right before the last time he left my house before he had to go in, and told me that everything would work out. He had that same look on his face he always had, and I remember thinking to myself that I hoped he didn’t come back with it, but instead I pulled him by his ear close to my face and said to him sternly “don’t come back here,” and for the first time ever doing something wrong, and for the first time ever doing something out of pure spite toward me, he did.

by M. Emmanuel Baptiste