Word Count: 2,064 (two in one)

He started in the living room.

It was, without argument, the dingiest room in the house – except, perhaps, for his father’s room, which Paris rarely entered and his father used even less. The living room was small and cluttered, like every other room in the house. Most of the space was taken up by an old sofa and matching loveseat, and an overlarge, battered entertainment center his dad had gotten at the Good Will years ago, reassembled to house the bulky square television, so horribly outdated, a secondhand DVD player, a partially functioning VCR, an old stereo bought at a time when records and cassette tapes were still widely used, and his father’s small collection of movies and records. Framed photos sat shielded by the glass of the entertainment center, pictures taken by his father many, many years ago, before he’d lost his ambition – pictures of the beaches in the south of France, of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Sacré Cœur. Small glass figurines took up the rest of the space, left behind by his mother, just like he and his father.

Beer cans littered the floor and cluttered the coffee table. Pizza boxes – one more recent, only half empty – crowded the end tables and rose in stacks upon the carpet. Paris started with them, tossing every last one into a large black trash bag, until it was stretched and straining and threatened to burst with all the refuse. After that, he went into the kitchen and dumped the unopened case of beer that was in the refrigerator for good measure. He took the trash to the garbage bin outside, vacuumed the carpet and the couches, scrubbed the tables clean, dusted and wiped the smudges off the glass of the entertainment center.

He had the TV on, the images of old home videos flashing across the screen.

“What are you building, Baby?” his mother’s voice asked.

“A castle,” a younger voice, light and childish, responded with enthusiasm over the soft clacking of blocks being forced on top of one another.

“And how did Daddy teach you to say that?”

“Un chateau!”

“Who lives in the chateau?”

“Une princesse!”

“Are you going to save the princess?”

“Non!” the childish voice responded emphatically. “The prince will!”

“But who’s the prince?”

“Not me!”

“Then what are you?”

“Nobody, Momma! Just me!”

The windows were open. The AC had cut out at some point. Paris couldn’t remember when. It always seemed to. A light breeze drifted in as he moved on to the kitchen, trashing old leftovers and milk gone sour. He scrubbed out the sink, mopped the floor, and changed a light-bulb that had blown in the fixture on the ceiling. He took another full black trash bag outside, and returned to start on his father’s overflowing baskets of dirty laundry, separating colors from whites, and loading the first pile into the washer.

His bedroom was next, cleaner than the rest of the house, but still in need of a good pick-up. He made his bed, pulled the pink comforter over the pale green sheets and set the swan Ladon had sewn for him onto his pillow, removed empty candy wrappers from his bedside table, picked his clothes up off the floor to place them with the rest of the laundry, returned his shoes to his closet, and dusted the figurines that covered the top of his dresser. His phone sat on his desk next to the purse he’d used a few days before, by a pink computer on its last legs, a black note book emblazoned with a golden symbol on the front, and an empty fishbowl. A red light blinked from the phone to show that he had a message, but Paris ignored it.

He didn’t want to talk to anyone, because no one would understand.

A few of the neighbors had come by to express their concern, a couple of them leaving dishes of casserole and platters of cookies in his hands. Momma Benson, as all the neighborhood kids called her, had come down the street to deliver one of her homemade apple pies. Paris had taken all the food appreciatively, but invited no more company than that. The casserole he’d finished the night before, the cookies with it, and the apple pie sat on the counter, half eaten for breakfast.

He didn’t want to talk to anyone, because he didn’t know who to talk to.

Not his mother, surely. He could imagine her voice easily enough, half concerned for him, and half critical of his father. “He’s brought it upon himself,” she would say, and in a way she would be right. Paris didn’t know what he hated more – his mother, or the fact that he agreed with her. “Why don’t you come to New York with me now, Baby? It’s not good for you in that house.”

Chris would be more sympathetic, he knew, but awkward as well. Chris would never be able to understand, not truly, not with both of his parents alive, so much in love with one another, not with his fancy homes and his fancy clothes and his fancy new car and his perfect everything. What did he know about what Paris was feeling? What did he know about this sort of struggle or hardship? What did he know about anything, really, except fancy buildings and baseball and the perfect life?

Resentment filled him, twisting his stomach, but it didn’t last long, because none of this was Chris’s fault, and he needed Chris, now more than ever, even if he couldn’t talk to him, even if Chris would never understand, because Chris was normal, and Paris needed normalcy more than anything, and that thought, more than anything else about the situation, brought tears to his eyes, because he knew he would never have normalcy again.

He cleaned his father’s bedroom last, after scrubbing out the tub and sink and toilet in the bathroom. The second bedroom was larger than his, but there was less inside it to take up room, just a bed, a bureau, two bedside tables, and nothing more. A dark curtain was pulled over the window so that there was no natural light, the sheets and blankets were dirty and in disarray, the bureau and tables covered in a visible layer of dust. Paris forced the window open to air out the room, stripped the bed and replaced it with fresh sheets and blankets, picked up a few stray beer cans here and there, wondering how long they’d been there.

He dusted the bureau first, then the bedside tables. One was bare; the other held nothing more than a lamp without a working bulb, a clock that showed the wrong time, and a picture frame resting on its glass face. Paris picked it up to dust it off and wished he hadn’t. Behind the glass was framed an old picture of his parents – his father looking younger, healthier, a little less bearish, a little less defeated; his mother looking fair and beautiful, marginally happy, all warm gray-blue eyes, curly blonde hair, and flushed cheeks as her hands rested gently against a swelling stomach.

For a minute, Paris imagined what it would have been like if the emotions in the picture had lasted, if the man he saw there had been a less irascible father, if the woman had continued to enjoy being a mother. He imagined a larger house, a big back yard, a swing set, a dog, and a white picket fence instead of the rusting chain links that surrounded the patchy grass out front. He imagined an easier life, with less fighting, more acceptance, and less pain, but the image shattered before it could become too clear, and Paris placed the picture back on the bedside table, face down, as he’d found it.

He left his father’s room and shut the door. Finally done, he returned to the living room, and sat heavily in the very center of the couch.

He was tired. His head ached from little sleep and the strong scent of cleaning chemicals, of soap and bleach and the lemon scent of wood polish. His hands felt dry and raw, his palms tinged red from scrubbing, his knuckles aching. He was sweaty, perspiration slicking his forehead, dripping from his temple down the side of his face, dampening his bangs which stuck to his cheeks and the sides of his neck. His ponytail had loosened, a few more strands falling into his face, and his t-shirt clung to him uncomfortably, his tired, aching body begging for a wash, for rest, for the peaceful oblivion of sleep.

He looked around the living room, expecting to feel pleased by a successful cleaning day. Instead, he felt defeated. The house was small and empty. Now that he was done, he had nothing else to do but think – think of his father, waiting to come home, and think of himself, and the future that seemed even less certain than before.

There was nothing left for him to do. He was exhausted – emotionally, mentally, physically – and he didn’t know where to go from there.

He was only seventeen, yet there were all these complications – school, his sick father, his absent mother, his powered obligations, and none of it he wanted, none of it he’d asked for.

He was only seventeen, yet he felt so much older.

“Can you do a dance for me?” his mother’s voice asked from the television, the sort of high, cutesy voice parents used when speaking to their very young children.

Paris looked to the screen and saw himself on camera, three or four years old, in a white shirt and a pair of short red overalls. His hair had been paler then, the platinum blond of fair haired children, but just as curly. He had his arms raised, his hands holding one of his mother’s wide-brimmed summer hats to his head.

“Show Mommy how pretty you dance,” his mother said, her voice close, from behind the camera.

The little boy grinned widely, showing off rows of white baby teeth, and flung the hat aside as he spun in a clumsy attempt at a pirouette.

“Very good!” his mother gushed. “Are you Mommy’s pretty, dancing baby?”

A vigorous nod and another wide baby grin.

“Say ‘I dance,” his mother coached him.

“I dance!”

“Now say it like Daddy taught you.”

“Je danse!”

“Say ‘I love you, Mommy.’”

“Je t’aime, Maman!”

“Say ‘I love you, Daddy.’”

“Je t’aime, Papa!”

His mother laughed, the camera shook and panned closer, and Paris knew she was moving in to hug him.

“You’re growing up so fast,” she said, with a hint of regret in her voice.

“I will not grow up,” the little boy that Paris had once been said with all the innocent determination of a child.

“What will you be if you don’t grow up?” his mother asked.

“A baby.”

“You can’t stay a baby forever.”

“Yes, I can! Always Momma’s baby!”

“Just Mommy’s?”

“And Daddy’s!” he added. A pair of jean clad legs could be seen in the background. “An’ you will always be my Momma, an’ Daddy will always be my Daddy, always an’ ‘ever!”

“That’s a long time, kiddo,” a familiar voice, less harsh but still notably rough, said from a distance.

His mother laughed, hugged him a little longer, and pulled away, repeating fondly, “Always and forever.”

That last thing to show on the screen was child Paris’s beaming face as from behind a pair of hands slipped beneath his arms, and he was picked up by his father. Then it went black, the sound cut out, the VCR clicked and the gears whirred, and the tape began to rewind.

Paris sat on the couch, feeling empty and alone. His arms were limp, his hands useless at his sides, his body sinking into the cushions as if he could somehow be consumed by them, surrounded and swallowed and taken away from this place, full of memories that trapped and chained him, and wouldn’t let him go, when all he wanted was to escape.

His eyes stung. He closed them against the tears, squeezed them shut to keep them from falling, slowly bringing his knees up to his chest, his arms looping around them.

“You lied,” he said to the empty room. “Son of a b***h, why did you lie?”