Imagine That (Short Stories) by Leon Rice (essential reading .txt) 📖

“Where are ya little man? Where is my wonderful little son? Come out you little son-of-a-bitch! It‘s what for I’m goin’ to give ya!”

Heart pounding, he held his breath until he thought his head would surely pop. He could hear glasses breaking in the kitchen. Dishes crashed to the floor. Evan reasoned that he hadn’t been this drunk in a long while. He exhaled slowly, so as to not make a sound and deliberately, quietly, sucked in more air. Thump . . . Thump . . . Thump, went his heart. Thump . . . Thump . . . Thump. All he knew was that he had to not let him find him. He’d have to get out of the house some how.

“If I can just give the alcohol time to pass trough his system, maybe it won’t be that bad after he sobers up,” was his only conjecture. Evan started to slide out from under the bed when he felt intense pain. Patrick had him by the hair and pulled him out, kicking and screaming.

Patrick yelled, “Got cha, ya little beggar! I‘m gonna teach ya a lesson. Why am I gonna teach ya a lesson? Cause I’m the meanest bastard in this town, that’s all. And you’re the mean bastard’s son. What a plight!”

The stench of whiskey permeated the air as Patrick dragged him to the cellar door. With one shove, he sent Evan tumbling down the stairs. As he sailed through the air, he pleaded with God, “Please help God, please help me!” Evan landed on his chest, knocking the air from his lungs. There would be no help from God, and he knew it.

Patrick tied Evan’s wrists and hung him from a pipe in the ceiling and beat him relentlessly.

“Beg me, you little bastard, beg me to stop!”

The beating continued. Ultimately, it was more than Evan could take.

“Please stop Poppa! Please stop,” said Evan with a whimper.

Patrick grinned a broad and happy grin.

“That‘s what I wanted to hear, little man, that‘s what I wanted to hear! Finally you said it!”

Patrick cut him loose; he fell to the floor and he dragged him to a closet, shoved him in and lock the door. The air was dank, with the scent of soot. Remarkably, he felt no pain. His body was numb: Quit unquestionably, he had been beaten senseless.

“Is this my tomb God? Is this where I die,” thought Evan, totally submitted now to servitude to his father. “But I might really die. Would he have in fact won if I die,“ thought Evan. “I’m not being melodramatic God. Seriously God, Is this my tomb?”

His father had won. He had won the sick, stupid, game that he played with Evan. He knew that was true when he begged him to stop. Evan never begged, but this time he did. He simply couldn’t take it any more. His father was the master and he was the slave.

He tried to talk to God again, but there was no response and finally he said with a gasping breath, “Please let me die, God. Please . . . let me die.” Evan lost consciousness. The itsy bitsy spiders scurried over his lifeless body. If he had know it, he would have been terrified.

* * * *

Tickle, tickle, scurry, scurry, is what Evan felt on his bare legs - tiny little creatures from dark reclusive hiding places scampered all about all over Evan’s body. Not being able to see them, not see the repulsiveness of their form, instead of being terrified, he merely brushed they away.

“Where am I,” he thought. “Darkness. Again, darkness.” He became aware of his back. The pain was searing hot. “Poppa, it must have been Poppa,” he thought.

God had helped him after all: He had no recollection of the beating. The pain, although extreme, was nothing compared to what it would have been if God had not intervened. All that Evan remembered was the fact that he had been beaten and that he had begged his father to stop.

“No dear God, No! You let Poppa win God! You let Poppa win!”

Evan sat crouched on bended knees and cradled his face in his hands for a moment. He felt in the darkness to try to determine where he was.

“Oh yes, the storage closet. I’m in the storage closet again.”

He felt for the door handle until he became acclimated to the enclosure.

“Here it is,” he said. “Here it is!” The door was secured and would not open. A thought came to him out of no where: “I‘m the mean bastard‘s son. What a plight. That is the reality of it. . . What a plight . . . What a plight!”

He called out, quietly at first, “Poppa, Poppa,” then louder and with more zeal. He began pounding on the door and yelling his father name; he didn‘t call him Poppa, but rather Patrick, over and over again.

* * * *

Patrick was hunched over the table upstairs in the kitchen with a piece of dry toast and a cup of coffee in front of him. He leaned sideways and threw up in the trash can. He heaved and heaved and heaved: the dry heaves were the worst.

“How many pints did I have last night? Must a been a plenty,” he said as he wiped the spittle from his chin. Then he heard Evan downstairs and it struck his memory: “What have I done? What in God’s name have I done?” The flashes of memory of the beating reverberated in his brain. “No, no, sure ‘n if I didn‘t do that! But I did, didn’t I.” He had locked him in the storage closet before, but he had never beaten him like he beat him last night. He recounted the beating almost blow by blow. He sat dumbfounded in his recovering stupor.


He was sharing a cup with his father; the cup of inexhaustible, loathing and hatred and even if it tasted sour at first, they wallowed in the commonality of it. It was the one thing they agreed on: They truly hated one another and they “loved” to hate one another. They were symbiotic in their resolve.

Imagine That
A short story by Leon Rice

Dundee had been painting for about 10 years. He wasn’t an artist, but he had been painting for that long. What he really was, was a patient. He had been forced to retire 20 years ago for health reasons. He was a heart patient, a cancer patient, a diabetes patient, and high blood pressure patient. He had almost died twice and had been placed on disability from the government and was waiting to die. I suppose you could say he was in fact a professional patient. He watched TV for the first ten years and finally decided that he wasn’t being productive, that he had wasted ten years of his life, so he taught himself to paint. It seemed that he wasn’t going to die after all.

He painted portraits for three years, nothing but portraits. He loved peoples faces; they were so telling. He painted portraits in imaginary settings, of imaginary people, with imaginary smiles, and imaginary glints in their eyes. His portraits hung on his studio walls. There were 30 portraits, hung without frames, one next to the other in a line all along the top of one wall.

He would turn the lights on high in his studio and sit in his recliner chair, with his feet up, and analyze each painting, remembering what he was thinking when he painted this, or what he was thinking when he painted that one. He had assigned each painting a name that matched the look on the person’s face. Although many of the people were smiling, they didn’t look like happy people. There was an eeriness in the room as his portraits stared back at him. Sometimes he wished they weren’t there, that he hadn’t painted them, but didn‘t have the compulsion to take them down. He thought out loud, that he was simply not being productive.

He branched out and purchased books about famous artists: books about Vermeer, and Albrecht Durer, Van Gogh, and Michael Angelo. He read books on practically every artist and style that existed and tried to paint like all of them, in many different styles, with some success I suppose you could say. His paintings were quite good actually.

Dundee thought even though he was not an artist, if I could sell some of his paintings, he might receive some recognition as a painter. Being 60 years old, he made the realization that he would never be an artist, but quite simply a “patient.” Artists had degrees in art and years of training; he had nothing but his artwork as proof of anything.

Deciding to sell a couple of his painting, he looked for a small gallery that might take them. He went to a gallery in the city and approached the owner. She said that she would be happy to take the painting and try to sell them. Several weeks afterward he brought two small still life painting to the gallery. He stood before the owner of the gallery with a painting in each hand and explained that he’d talked to her about the paintings before and that he had brought them for her to see. She took a business card from her desk and without looking at the paintings, handed it to him and said they didn’t have space for them at this time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

It had taken him a great amount of soul searching