Deer are opportunistic carnivores, though they can eat meat, they don’t have to – I wonder if there is a term for the opposite. I push up the front of my hair, it’s shorter than the rest of it, too short to stay in my hair tie and long enough to get in my eyes. It falls back down and it’s useless to try again. My father sits at the head of the table, me and mother either side, and my brother next to me. From across the table I see a scowl, a particular kind of look I don’t care to let my eyes linger on. I’ll know enough of my mother’s anger later, the walls are too thin to muffle anything worth muffling. Sat across from me, she doesn’t raise her voice above a whisper. When alone, my father doesn’t get the same privilege.
“Try the meat,” My father urges, filling the silence. He knows I won’t, I have picked everything off my plate but those that touch the soggy, grey slab. My brother takes the steak without asking, but leaves behind the vegetables. They’ll go in the compost. I’ll go hungry. It’s the same every night.
I wash up tonight, nothing but water, a sponge, and a stick of something that isn’t commercial-grade soap but is the best in the house. I wondered if my mother stashed away some secret perfume, to smell as well as she does, but I know it is simply that, unlike her husband and sons, she never goes downstairs. She prefers the exit to the back alley, which is the only alley my mother has ever been able to stomach her way through. Anything to avoid to blood. I wish I could do the same, but I’m the eldest son, I don’t get to make that choice.
I take as long as I can washing up, before grabbing a hair net and trudging downstairs. My brother picked up my slack, he always does, chattering on to some old lady who came in late to buy a steak, or something equally grotesque. There is an awkwardness as I shoo him into the back to wash his hands
“Ah, and how have you been?” Mrs Fields has always been nice to me, but I can see that look in her eyes and I remember, awfully vivid, when she muttered something about perverts in church and cast a glance my way. I think it’s my hair, a judgement not cast onto my brother who’s hair is equally long but his age half my own. My mother insists we don’t cut it, my father is complacent, and I am a victim to the stigma and the accusation of faggotry though I’ve never cast my thoughts towards another boy in my life. If not for the hairnet, I would’ve brushed my bangs from my face
I mutter something about being okay, a lie I barely get out, but she accepts it because she doesn’t care enough to question me. She doesn’t really want to know, she just doesn’t want to be rude. I want her to fall face-down onto a metal pike. We don’t all get our wishes.