A Set of his Own

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you do anything right?” The words came out of Tom’s mouth, but they originated from somewhere long ago and far away, like the old tennis injury in his knee that reappeared every time the weather became cold and damp. His son, Tommy, recoiled from the onslaught with a pained expression. He had wanted to record the Raiders game for his dad, but had accidentally erased a seminar that he needed to watch for work.

Tom walked away and started doing the breathing and tapping exercises that his therapist had shown him. The techniques worked to bring him down after he was escalated, but were not so effective with prevention. Once he calmed down, he mounted the stairs and knocked on Tommy’s door.

“Go away!” Tommy’s voice was strained, making him sound younger than his fourteen years.

“I’m really sorry, son. I just want to talk to you.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“Tom, leave him alone,” his wife’s voice implored wearily. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough talking for the day?”

Words rose through the depths of time to his lips, but he bit off his response at “Why don’t you…”

“Why don’t I what?” she demanded. “What’s the matter? You don’t have as much to say to someone who can fight back?”

Tom took a long, deep breath and walked back to his room. It used to be his study before they started sleeping separately. He laid down, put on his noise-canceling headphones and started working on his visualization exercises. He pictured his anger as a green cloud, exhaled with each hurtful word, surrounding him. This established that his anger was something separate from himself, but still inside of him. Something that could get on other people like an infectious fog. He was sick with it. Worse still, he had gotten it all over his son and his wife.

The red velvet image of the light shining through his closed eyes darkened like the curtain in an old-fashioned movie theater before it opened to reveal the screen. His face as a child in the mirror, forehead creased, wet cheeks, jaw set straight and mouth curved downward in an exaggerated frown. His subconscious mind slowly adjusted the contours of this face until it became Tommy’s, burned into his memory from the first time he had spanked him. A sordid cocktail of anger, betrayal and disbelief.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you do anything right?” boomed the voice of his father. The face became elongated, cigarette-yellowed teeth were framed by 1970s muttonchop sideburns and punctuated by the sickening green smell of bourbon-laced mouthwash.

“I can do something right,” Tom told his demon as he rose to go and speak with his son about a pain that they both suffered. He didn’t expect any forgiveness, his own father was buried without it, but showing Tommy his battle scars might help him to avoid a set of his own.