Fester

Those words from over a decade ago haunted me still: I never want to see you again.
What was behind that proverbial door, a lady or a tiger? A dark creature stirred in my intestines, slithered its way through my stomach and into my esophagus. Then it pounded on the wall of my skull. The email beckoned me, whispered my name. With a trembling hand, which formed perspiration on the mouse, I double-clicked on the images.
Who were the strangers in the downloaded photos, peering at me through glass eyes and wax smiles? Where was my dear cousin Jenna--my club house playmate with golden hair--now replaced with a faded version of her youth, eyeliner smeared into wrinkles and chest sagging under a matronly gown? And where was my cousin Jeremy? He was replaced by an aged stunt double with hair nearly receding to his ears and a belly bloated like a fish in the sun. Tears began to pool at the sight of sweet Aunt Becky, whose body was snatched by an old hag--the same one who took both her kidneys and forced her on dialysis.
But the creature rattled most on my cranium at the sight of Father. I never want to see you again. What was I expecting? A man with a thick, raven feathered mane, crystal blue eyes, and a body builder's physique? Who was this Thing with webs clouding his eyes, a brittle mop resting on his leathered face, and skin slipping off his bones? Surely this wasn't the man, who only a decade ago flirted with Heather Locklear's twin at the bakery and thwarted off stalking women down the market aisles.
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I still felt the chill of that January morning when I stuck that note between the blade of the wiper and the icy windshield of his yellow VW Rabbit. I never want to see you again. His fondness for spirits had created the distance. My note increased the distance. The family saw no problem with his habits, so the distance was expanded.
"But I'm seeing a psychologist now," Father told Mother and I via the telephone.
My stoic reply never wavered: "The damage has been done. I never want to see you again." I was only nineteen.
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After a decade, I had my excuses for not making the Mulligan family reunion on the 13th, despite my cousin Daria's request--I lived four states away and worked full time. In the days that followed the opening of the email, I was amazed at the stranger who greeted me when I looked in my rear view mirror or passed by a department store window. Her flesh glistened with the kiss of the sun, her eyes shown bright as a lantern, and her hair shimmered with the sheen of a raven's wing. This woman of nearly thirty stones had the body of girl young enough to be carded as nineteen.
And yet, the dark sack of guilt and forgiveness grew inside me, like the swollen liver of an alcoholic. Each day after work, my stomach knotted and wretched as I moved the mouse, against my will, to Daria's email and double-clicked on that family portrait. And each day, they grew older and older, as if each passing moment was a decade. Their skin fit tight as drum leather against their translucent bones. Their hollowed eyes were fodder for crows. By the fifth day, the scenery of Echo Park was transparent through their paper thin bodies. The bones leaned into each other like the frame of a tepee. Father's index finger, once the size of a sausage, now the consistency of chicken bone, pointed in my direction. I never want to see you again.
On the seventh day, the pile of bones collapsed like a building under dynamite. The dust of their existences mixed with the playground sand. I gasped as I felt the creature around my throat, icy and tight like a wiper blade trapping a note.