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2
Theo Griffin
Silence is Power
The news hit hard — on every channel, on every screen, every department store window I passed, and every tweet that bleeped and annoyed the ever-living shit out of me until I tossed my phone to my assistant and told her to take it away. Half a year has passed since the day that rocked my world,again, but I remember it as clearly now as if it happened only this morning.
Colum Bishop — that mother-murdering bastard — is dead.
The news was both freeing and annoying. Satisfying and oppressive. It made me giddy with relief, but then it sent me into the kind of funk I hadn’t experienced in decades; I wanted to be the reason he was eliminated from this world. I wanted to own the bullet that passed through his brain, and I wanted to control the finger that gently massaged the trigger of a gun.
I’d planned for it to be me; for two long decades, it was a promise and a goal. But not everyone gets what they want, and life hasneverhinted that I would be one of the lucky ones.
At least he’s dead, at least he’s gone. It shouldn’t matter to me who did it.
I remember theBreaking Newsbanner that relentlessly slid across my screen. It played all day and night, an unending reminder that interrupted every commercial, every show, every news piece. His name wasevery-fucking-whereas I tried to go about my day.
It’s not like I wasn’t busy with my work, and it’s not like I didn’t already know everything the journalists were crying about. I knew more than they did, I knew it earlier, I knew the facts, but like vultures on a carcass, they took whatever scrap was offered, even knowing it was shitty intel and lacked the very thing they as journalists promise — facts.
Colum Bishop was taken out in a police standoff, and the bullet that passed through his brain belonged to a small-town cop from a town in the back of nowhere.
Apt, I suppose. I possess a deep loathing for the police, but that one dude might have received a Christmas card and gift from my company last year.
I used to be a boy who slept behind dumpsters and raided the trash from fancy restaurants. They knew a child lived in their alleyways, so where they once callously tossed their leftovers, they began leaving them in foam containers. Those containers still had to go in the trash – something about workplace policy – but when you’re hungry, you don’t give a single shit about where the food came from. When it’s still lukewarm and smells of garlic and spices, you’re willing to eat the damn foam to get to it.
That was my life from eleven to seventeen.
I ran away from a dark club after watching my father and his friends murder my mother, I ran into an alley, and I didn’t leave again for a long time. I had nowhere to go. I had no one to run to. I didn’t have keys to access my apartment, and even if I did, I didn’t have transport to get there. Hitchhiking the three hours’ drive didn’t enter my mind until I was older, and by that point, my mom had already been buried and the ‘army guy’— Colum Bishop — had moved on.
My apartment would have been packed up by the first of the month when the rent wasn’t paid, and that sweater, that stupid fucking red sweater with little white dinosaurs, was a symbol for everything I wanted in life but could never have again. It was just a sweater, but to me, it was symbolic. It was the theft of my childhood. The murder of my family. The scars a boy had been given, and the nightmares that same boy had to endure.
Night after night, a child’s brain played on repeat the last seconds of his mother’s life. It was a steady stream through my conscience, just like the ribbons ofBreaking Newson my television screen.
My mother was nothing more than trash in Colum Bishop’s eyes. She was worth less to him than the foam dishes were to the restaurant staff who periodically fed me.
My growth spurts, those spurts I was kind of proud of and showed off to a short, chubby girl with cute hair, slowed. You can’t grow the way I had been when you have no food or a safe space to sleep. You can’t maintain that kind of growth, and though my body wanted it for me — my body ached, and my eyes drooped — food and sleep are instrumental in that process.
I had easy access to neither.
That was more than twenty years ago, but that boy is not the same as the man I am now. That boy died long ago, eliminated in the dark and reborn again as someone else. Gunner Bishop was murdered the same day his mother was, deleted from this world. His medical records just… stopped.
Schooling, stopped.
Dental, stopped.
Even the after-school program where he could play ball with counsellors, or draw in the quiet rather than be home alone seven days a week, it was all gone.
The news spoke of the missing child. They considered it foul play, and really… wasn’t it? It seemed pretty fucking foul to me. Watching your mother’s rape and then her murder, sleeping in the freezing cold and wishing for your sweater more than you wished for your mother or a meal, it was all symbolic of a pretty fucking foul life.
Gunner Bishop died when he was eleven years old.
That child was nameless for years. He was voiceless, because he had no one to talk to, no one who would listen if he spoke.Selective mutism? I think that’s what those with the important degrees call it.
For six years, he literally didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. And when you do something for such a prolonged period of time, or in my case,don’tdo something, it becomes a way of life.
When you lose one sense — for me, that was speech — the others become stronger. I was able to hear the footsteps of a rat in my alleyway. I was able to smell salmonella when science says it’s impossible. I was able to ignore the heat and cold, effectively turning my body into one giant callus. Weightlifters and laborers have callused hands. At first, they get blisters, it hurts and makes a man miserable. But eventually, those hands toughen up, they become hard, and nothing can hurt them again.
Spending the tail end of a winter living in an alleyway; that’s all it took for me to harden the fuck up.
