Know It All

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The hospital I’ve called my home for the last 30 years can only be described as an asylum. While the word has fallen out of favor, the situation inside has remained consistent. Days stretch in interminable swaths of gray and white; gray from the medication in the mornings, white from the medication in the afternoons. Only the blackness of night frees me from the consuming palate of mid-winter rain clouds used to paint my days away.

I am here by my own volition. The fact I used the law to enact that volition is a mere technicality. The fact I stole the volition of someone else to gain use of the law is another. At the end of the bloodbath – at the end of the steaming orgy of crimson and savagery – I’d gotten my wish. I’d never need to harm another living thing for the rest of my life.  

The sights and sounds which etched themselves into my soul on that May morning in 1986 still flash through. Between timed doses, gray melts into red. Red bleeds into white. To any other man, those flashes would be the proof of his madness; the seeping of illness into medicated docility. But I know far more than any other man.

On May 3rd, 1986, I awoke to find my young son in the room with me. We stared at one another for a moment. Then I rolled out of bed and went to the garage. By lunchtime, I had chopped him into 400 pieces. On May 4th, the front page of the newspaper featured a picture of his blonde hair stuck to the blade of my axe.

To those who read the story or saw the news, I was labeled a monster. To those who served the courts and reviewed the evidence, I was labeled insane. To me, however, the person who conversed with the pieces as they were liberated from my son, I was not a monster. I was not insane. I was a man who needed knowledge. My boy held the secrets to it all.

I discussed what lay beyond our universe with Aaron’s left foot. The foot laughed. It was Aaron’s small voice. It told me to ask the shin. More blows of the axe brought the shin into our discussion. But it could tell me very little; only that the knee had much more information.

And so it went.

The leftmost quadrant of Aaron’s lower mandible informed me I was close, and his upper-right incisor screamed with delirious laughter while it spoke of the secrets I’d learn from the uvula and tonsils. When the axe would no longer suffice – its blunt brutality too clumsy to properly extricate the tiny pieces with whom I needed to converse – my pocket knife and its keen precision continued the work. Three hours later, with 400 pieces of child organized around me by order of their knowledge, we began our formal chat. And I learned everything.

I write this today as a prisoner. As a patient. As a father. In this unmedicated interstice between gray and white, I can reflect on the red. Not the red of blood, but the red of It All: the rich, vermillion expanse of flesh and organs on which this universe is a scab.

On the last night of his life, an emissary from It All visited Aaron as he slept. It whispered its secrets into every part of him, and my son, who was the most caring, generous person I’d ever met, knew he had to share it with me. So he waited, patiently, for me to wake.

On the morning of May 3rd, 1986, I lifted my sleep mask to see Aaron floating above my bed, watching me. Bright sunlight streamed across us. The dancing reflection of light against the shiny crimson of his sclera dazzled me. Enthralled me. He opened his mouth, but remained silent. He tried again, but it was no use; It All was inside him. His mouth contained no cavity – only solid red streaked with veins. He brought his pinky finger to my ear and placed it inside, and the fingertip told me what I needed to do. Four hours later, I’d brought It All out of Aaron and into my mind. And now into yours.

Daily fogs of grays and whites desaturate what I’ve seen, but they cannot hide the presence of what I know is there. I am not insane. The red which courses through the arterial network of multiversal organs and flesh is beyond sanity. Beyond mind. But not beyond body. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know I’ll get to touch Aaron again.

Even now, through It All, I feel him pressing against the walls, reaching for me, and speaking to me; each part of him singing choruses of thanks and praise. It’s the praise which gives me the most comfort as I sit, day after day, year after year, and wait. I wait knowing I am loved and appreciated. That’s more than enough. It’s the dream of every father to give It All to his son.

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4 Replies to “Know It All”

  1. Truly one of your most unsettling stories I have read thus far. Still can’t decide if he just went crazy before the act, during the act, or just accepted the crazy after the act. Either way great story!

  2. I can only imagine what the inside of the boy’s mouth looked like. Sooooo creepy!! I swear I’m feeling it in my own mouth, euuugh. I suppose he actually did go insane and just butchered his son, right??
    I liked this story. You’re definitely one of my favourite horror writers ever.

    1. Thank you! Yeah the inside of his mouth was a really gross image and I have no idea where it came from. As far as what actually happened, I don’t really know. I guess the easy explanation would be that he went insane, but that’s only because the other explanation is even more unsettling.

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