Acts of Waiting

Characters: The boy and the man

Location: The boy's bedroom in the house

ACT I

That night as the boy sat on his bed in his dark room, he was 12 and had never waited before. Six years of hiding. This was the first time he had ever waited for the man's gravel-throated, angry sputtering, a violent din spawned from hate.

ACT II

“Goddammit,” followed by the sound of non-cadenced feet, stumbling, lurching through the side door downstairs. “Goddammit!” Three syllables, scattering the house-silence into shards of broken glass then converting it into heat. “Where is the boy? You better not make me have to look for you!”

As the boy sat waiting upstairs in the dark, he heard the man's angry slurring. “Where’s that fucking boy? I’ll find you, you son of a bitch. When I do . . .” Sitting on his bed in the dark, The boy watched the rectangle outline of the closed bedroom door haloed by the hall light.

ACT III

“Goddammit.” The bedroom door opened, pushing the hall light through the opening, immediately, without transition, filling the room with a muted, secondary yellow light. A detached hand extended into the room, molesting the wall, probing for the light switch. The man's flushed, enflamed face followed the hand. Eyes wide, waterlogged, darting without any discernable pattern, as they dismounted on the boy's unexpected face staring back at him, the rhetorical “What the fuck?” suspended between them, draped over the man's disbelief.

ACT IV

That moment, that suspended instant, their eyes converged, affixing the boy and the man to those immutable seconds. The man broke the glare and faltered, right fist raised, eyes callous, slack, intent. As the man came close, fist raised and in motion towards the boy's face, the boy grabbed the man's clinched, moving fist and pulled on it, bringing their faces within an inch of each other. The boy could smell the reek of bourbon and cigarettes on the man's warm breath as their eyes steel-bolted.

“If you ever hit me or Mama again, I’ll fucking kill you,” the boy whispered into the man's face.