FICTION: Daddy’s Little Boy by Joe Mynhardt

Jeremy closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Every muscle in his body tensed as he bellowed the words, “Shut up!” across the dining room table.

He stood up. The chair toppled over and he stared at his father seated at the far end. “Look what you did, Sir,” he said as he pointed to the rest of his family seated around the table. His left eye twitched an inch. “And it’s all your fault.”

His father squinted. His stare cut into Jeremy’s soul like a chainsaw through an ice statue.

He looked away. “Stop looking at me that way,” he shouted at the others. None of you did anything to help me. You didn’t even try.” He pushed back the tears. “You know how many pills I have to drink every day to look and feel just a little normal?”

Jeremy’s wife uttered a mumble and he silenced her with a smack of his hand across the jaw. “Stop it. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

His eye twitched again and he hit himself against the forehead, anything to make the voices go away, even for just a little while. “Now look at her. Look what you made me do, Sir.”

A line of blood streaked across his wife’s chin from behind the gag in her mouth. She slumped down in her chair. The last bloody bubble of oxygen crept out the corner of her nose.

Jeremy took a deep breath and leaned forward. He stared into his father’s seasoned eyes. Tranquility, born from a source unknown to him, eased through his skin. “Remember when you forced me to kill Chucky,” Jeremy whispered. “What kind of father makes you kill your own dog?” Jeremy raised his voice again. “Thank God I’ll never have children. Imagine how messed up they’ll be. Your fault. All your fault.”

Jeremy glanced at the bodies of his niece and her husband seated to his right, tied and gagged to their chairs, kitchen knives still protruding like plastic limbs from their purple and black necks. He slammed his fist onto the table. “Eat your food. You didn’t see the things he made me watch. You weren’t the only ones he touched, you know. The only ones he made . . . You know nothing!”

With another twitch of his eyes he hit himself against the head once more. “Stop it. Stop judging me!” He moaned several incoherent remarks, grabbed a steak knife with his shivering hand and plunged the knife into his wife’s neck. He sighed. He cried. “I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to have the baby.”

His father stomped on the ground and, what at first appeared to be an attempt to beg through the gag tearing into the corners of his mouth, chuckle.

Jeremy caressed his wife’s face before he pulled out the knife and strolled past his family towards his father. He glided the knife over his dead grandmother’s cranium and stood beside his father. “Remember when you showed up drunk when I was in rehab, Sir?”

His father kept laughing as he looked up at Jeremy, but his eyes started to betray his anger. His fear.

It made Jeremy smile and, for the briefest of moments, happy – content. He jerked his arm back and thrust the knife deep into his father’s side with the belligerence of a wounded animal; again and again. “Die!” he shouted. He drove the knife deeper every time, almost lifting his father out of the chair. He pulled the blade back and allowed a drop of blood to drip onto his tongue.

He walked back to the head of the table for the final curtain of his performance. “And now with your dying breath I will repay you for all you’ve done. Like it or not, Sir, your family tree dies today. Your evil seeds will wither and die.”

Jeremy lost himself in his father’s fading eyes, searching for the smallest hint of remorse, but found nothing. “You never even loved me.”

He pulled a gun from his jacket pocket, curled it under his chin and sprayed the ceiling with discolored brain-matter and chunks of fleshy bone.

His eye stopped twitching.



Bio: Joe Mynhardt is a South African horror writer and teacher. With multiple publications and a tome of story ideas scraping for a chance to be written, Joe Mynhardt is definitely a writer to keep an eye on.



Read more about Joe and his creations at www.Joemynhardt.com.