Sobriety

The second bottle thudded to the floor, clinking against the first. In reality, it wasn’t the second bottle, and its friend down there on the floor wasn’t the first, either. A more accurate way to classify it would have been “the second bottle of that night." The carpet was musty and stained throughout from the spills of hundreds of beer bottles over the last decade. Many of them still lay around, long empty. It didn’t take him long to drain them anymore.

Footsteps sounded in the room over. That was his daughter, clearing away the mess left by supper. They had ordered it, as always. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten something other than pizza or take-out Chinese. Granted, she was barely thirteen. It wasn’t like she could be expected to cook for the two of them, and he certainly was in no shape to do so. He hadn’t been for a while now.

Her silhouette appeared in the doorway. She was so small, with hunched shoulders and limp hair. She seemed aged in a way that no child ever should.

If he had been sober, he might have sobbed but for the childhood she never had, should have had. The childhood he had never given her.

She all but tiptoed into the room, gathering beer bottles and other garbage as quietly as she could, like she was trying to fade into the shadows around the edges of the room.

If he had been sober, he wouldn’t have been able to stand the look on her face when she shot him a quick glance. It was a mixture of pity and disgust, but worst of all was the fear. Her fear. She was afraid of him.

It wasn’t his daughter’s fault. Of course it wasn’t. She had only been a toddler when it happened. Barely walking, the only words she had even known then were Daddy and Mama. But the latter had soon faded from her vocabulary.

If he had been sober, he’d still have been able to hear his wife’s scream, the squeal of tires, the crunch of shattering glass and twisting metal.

She was too young to remember. His only child held no memories of her mother, the beautiful woman that she was growing up to so closely resemble. All she had were empty bottles for company and that ugly gash on the side of her forehead.

If he had been sober, he would have realized that it had been him who had given that to her, to his own daughter. And before that, the black eye. He might have noticed her scars. But even if he had been thinking clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to recall the incident anyway. The beer made sure of that.

His daughter didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. With no way to remember her mother - even pictures removed from the walls, since the memories hurt him too much - she would never know how much her father had loved his wife.

If he had been sober, he would’ve been able to feel every ache that the painful memories brought with them. Every gash and every wound, reopened. He would have remembered exactly how much he had loved her. Unfortunately, he also would have remembered that she was gone. That fact was what kept him firmly planted in the moldy recliner, surrounded by an army of empty glass bottles. He didn’t want to remember.

Despite the terror lurking in the shadows of his daughter’s face, the remnants of the blood she’d tried to clean from her temple, and the way she kept to the edges of the living room, as far away from him as possible, there would be no changes any time soon.

There was nothing left in this world that could drag him out of the grave he’d dug himself. The only person that could’ve done that was his wife, but she was in her own inescapable grave.

Sobriety was no longer something he could handle.