Akis Linardos | Issue 2.6
Always loved middles, ever since Mama brought me that chocolate egg enwrapping a capsule, enwrapping a toy soldier whose plastic tasted like thunder, thunder that shook my teeth, jolted lightning through my gums, electric tendrils reaching my amygdala and flaring my nostrils.
There's thunder in the middle of everything, different flavors of it. No middle is the same.
Faux Dad doesn't understand. He makes a fuss all the time. No such thing as a boy eating its toys, no such thing as soldiers that taste like thunder, no such thing as tasting thunder in the first place, no such—yadda, yadda, yadda, shut up, you vile man, what do you know? In my head there is a storm, and a storm craves thunder, thunder to overwhelm the noise of whooshing winds, the ringing tornado in my skull.
Maybe it’s envy. Maybe he wants to taste the thunder, thunder that will rattle his bones, rumble an earthquake and sprout volcanoes from his biceps to seem larger and terrify people as he likes to do. As he terrifies Mama, Mama who puts up with him because we need the money.
I chew harder, crave to sprout gusts of wind from my mouth, geysers to blow the abusive Faux Dad off the house, off to the streets where he’ll be eating garbage like he deserves, shoving banana peels down his stupid throat, and hopefully glass shards too, shards that will tear him from the inside and expose his wicked self for all to see.
The middle whose thunder probably tastes of rot.
—
Sat in the classroom today, munched on an apple, so fast the kids snickered and teacher sneered and asked me to stand so she can whip me with the ruler ’cause that solves everything, so I devoured it faster until I reached the rumbling core, then I slowed down, and wrapped my lips around the creased surface that’s better than walnuts because it’s lightning-sweet, and I rose from the seat because I wanted to. Because I wanted the teacher to be quiet.
Here I am now, a good boy, extending my palms for her to smack as my tongue curls around the core, the delicious middle, and I couldn’t care less so long as I can feel the cyanide energy pulsating within the forbidden fruit soul. But she extends her palm as well.
“Spit it.”
My tongue curls tighter around it. No one takes a middle away from me.
Her face turns red, cheeks like apples and I wonder if within are cores that taste like misery. “I said spit.”
My tongue curls even tighter around it, shackling it, claiming it, squeezing it against my palate, until my palate hurts and until it doesn’t hurt anymore because the core softens, letting out its sweet juice that tastes like everything middle should. Like rain, like life, like thunder.
Thunder that rattles my jaw, booms in my head, and strengthens my tongue muscles to squeeze the core more, until it’s a hardened pearl with no more juice to give.
And meanwhile the teacher has been staring me dead in the eyes, because she thinks this scares me, but I have wind demons living in my head and the demons outside, the power-drunk adults looming over small children, are nothing.
But she slaps me. And her slap shakes the thunder off and agitates a storm so wild, it could capsize boats, and in her slap I feel all the slaps Faux Dad has given me and I have had enough.
Wants me to spit, I spit, but with the gales thrashing wild in me, it geysers out, shoots through her eyeball and into her skull and blood pours out, a spray that spares me, luckily, while children scream and run, and I'm left here, wondering.
If the teacher could have witnessed my middle, my demons, would she have played with fire like so?
—
In my room, back home, after I ran.
This was not my fault. Teachers who slap kids, and fake fathers who slap true mothers, and big who slap small, should all have their insides exposed like frogs on dissecting tables so someone finally finds what is wrong with their middles.
I grab a pen, bite, suck the inside, until it inks my tongue, blackens my gums, and in the mirror the reflection is of a demon child like what Faux Dad calls me. The thunder tastes bad, like a quaking tsunami of mathematics and punishments of a hundred lines repeating the same sentence again and again.
I vomit.
My head stops ringing enough to hear stomping footsteps up the staircase, down the corridor, through my door. The skulking Faux Dad, a bear without fur.
He spits words but the storm in my head is back and I can’t tell what he says, only feel the spittle, and soon the belt is off and he’s about to lash me. The pen middle is still in my mouth, and its end tickles the back of my throat.
So I do the thing again, roll it until it’s dry and sharpened into a tiny spear, so when he raises his arm, I spit.
And it’s so clean, flying through the iris and into the optic nerve, and as his body spasms on the floor I know there was a kind of thunder in that pen, one that rattles his bones, forces his soul out like lightning, and leaves him bare as a cloud stripped of rain.
When Mama comes in, I expect the demon child mirrored in her eyes, but the reflection shows something precious. She hugs me, lifts me, and we’re away from the house, running into Faux Dad’s car, driving far, and I wonder what the morgue men will find when they open up the Faux Dad like a dissected frog specimen.
But it doesn’t matter. My fingers are steady. My heart has calmed. And for the first time, the starving storm in my skull is gone.
—
In a cove of a Greek island, Akis was born a rather peculiar infant and has only grown stranger every year. By day, he's a researcher of biomedical AI and ethics, hoping there's something less dystopian to come from this technology. His words have wormed their way into Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Uncharted Magazine, among others. Visit his website for updates on his dreadful machinations.
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