You are seventeen years old and your father is dead. Your father is dead in the backyard, slumped over the stump he used to chop wood on, the same ax used to make him meet a quick fate, but one that did not stop when he stopped feeling it. Your younger brother is still at school, and funnily enough, the only thing you can think of is how he's probably in his fifth period class right now. Something like an English class maybe? Or maybe that was his fourth period. Your memory was only good enough to pass by in conversation, not trying to rip these details off the top of your head in moments it didn't quite matter.

That isn't the point of it all though, the point of it is this: You are seventeen. Your father is dead. Your mother can't be found. You know what you should do.

It isn't like your father was the best man. Reclusive, closed off, cemented ideas in your mind that you would never externalize but that bite at the inside of your brain when you go to express yourself, like bug bites with no calamine lotion. Or like a rash. Maybe that's better. A rash. A constant, picking itch in the back of your head whenever your sister "forces" you to sit still while she practices makeup, when your little brother comes to you crying as he tries to explain what's happened that's ripping him up so terribly.

Though maybe it isn't fair to blame your father. Maybe there's just something fundamentally wrong with you. You've entertained the thought before. That just, maybe when God was making you perfect, like your mother said He did, maybe He forgot something. Something important to helping you relate to people and be able to cry with them. Maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with you for the way your protests against your sister's makeup practice aren't completely full hearted.

That is to say, he won't be missed. He was one of a hundred emotionally-closed, beats-their-wife-behind-closed-doors, closed-the-world-out men in this town. The police won't put that much effort into finding him, you won't put that much effort into an alibi. It will be shrugged off as a man who left his wife and kids, people could believe he'd been having an affair and eloped. It will be fine.

Maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with you for seeing your father's body, and the only thing you can think of is the fact that your brother is in his fifth period Algebra class, and the fact that God made you wrong, and the fact that your father could have an affair and it wouldn't be outlandish, and the fact that you know your mother is up in the room she shares with your father but nonetheless you pretend you don't know that, and that she's really made herself scarce.

You get up from the kitchen table, taking your mug of now-cold coffee with you. You lean over the sink, pressing your forehead against the cold glass. Making sure he's really dead out there, as if the ax in his back could be a prank and he could just jump up and shout "Gotcha!" and you'd laugh about it together. But your father isn't that sort of man. Your father definitely isn't any sort of man now. Just sort of, a limp body with a large, supermassive hole in the middle of it. Funnily enough, you can almost feel the future you could've had getting sucked into it.

You set your mug in the sink, not bothering to pour it out as you crouch down and open the cabinets. You're not quite sure how to go about it all, having never cleaned up a dead body before. You grab gloves, because that feels like the natural place to start. You figure at least if you need to make the body smaller, there's already a helpful, handy little ax already buried in what was his stomach.

You sigh and get up, heading out the back door again.

It takes you to your mother's room and it smells nice. It smells like her, with underlying tones of the blood that still sticks to the in-betweens of the floorboard that you can't get out no matter what you use to scrub it with. She hasn't slept in here in years, she's got a nice grave plot in the backyards next to the bird feeder, just like she always said she wanted.

You can see her so clearly, sitting on the edge of the bed facing the window. The sheets are crumpled and she's facing away from you, combing through her hair with her fingers and humming a song you don't quite know, but one that you could hum along with if you didn't want to disturb her.

The steps you take are slow and deliberate and your hand trembles as it goes to touch her shoulder. You glance in the mirror, the angle hitting the chair she kept in the corner of the room. You see yourself in it, boots and pants and shirt all covered in mud and other stains that make you sick to even think about. You look like what could be if your father had had your mother's animalistic nature to fight back. You almost laugh at the thought, but restrain yourself as to not either disturb your mother or not to devolve into a melted mess of laughter and tears on the floor. Blood drips from your mouth and nose and down your chin, and your skin is so, so very raw it hurts to look at. You smile and stop as quickly as you start when you see the reminiscents of viscera in between your teeth.

You look back at your mother. Gray cardigan, brown hair cropped at the shoulders, deep set smile lines framing a soft frown, dirtied ax in her lap, the same brown eyes you just looked right back into through the mirror, showing the same deep calm rage you saw in it as well. You know she can't really be here, but it's almost comforting that she is. It feels like if you don't move a muscle then maybe everything can go back to normal. Everything can go back to being seventeen, your father being dead and your mother having made herself scarce; Everything can go back to being body-burying and mother-consoling.

Like that's any sort of adolescent life you should be wanting or having.

The dream ends as quick as it started and after you wake up, lungs kick-starting so loud you're surprised it doesn't wake up your wife while you take what feels like an hour just not to suffocate on land. You shift out of bed as quietly as you can and grab your work boots from the end of your bed, throwing them on over the socks you slept in. You can feel your father rolling in his grave, an unmarked plot of land in the forest you can find by heart. You shrug on your coat despite only wearing an undershirt and pajama pants and lock the backdoor silently as you slip into the early hours of the day.