During the summer break, the world seemed to loosen its grip. People scattered in every direction — vacations planned months in advance, aimless tours taken on impulse, afternoons burned away outdoors or indoors under artificial lights meant to simulate pleasure. Some crossed borders, some escaped into crowds, and others disappeared into places like a strip club. While Andras, is still grounded, doing preparation for his future in the university.
The man, a lump on the sofa, bathed in the blue glow of a television, had mastered the art of doing nothing. Andras hated him for it, a silent, festering rot in his gut. But what could he do? Nothing.
A shadow fell over his desk. The air shifted, thick with the stale scent of cheap tobacco and unwashed clothes.
"Son, do you have any problems for now?" The voice, a low rumble, vibrated in the small room. Andras's gaze remained fixed on the quadratic formula.
"No, dad."
"That's my brilliant son, what a prodigy." A chuckle, hollow and dry, scraped against Andras' ears. It felt less like pride, more like a predator circling.
Andras offered nothing, his silence a shield, albeit a flimsy one. A sudden, stinging slap across his cheek ripped through the quiet. His head snapped back, a sharp pain blossoming.
"I'm fucking praising you, deadass!"
"Oh, uh... Thanks dad." The words spilled out, automatic, rehearsed. His jaw ached.
"Don't be like your mother, bitch! Always ignore my words, pay some fucking attention, you fucking understand?!"
"Yes, dad." Andras nodded, a frantic bob of his head, fear tightening his throat, a cold knot in his stomach. He remembered the last time, the sting, the shame.
"Good boy. Perchance, I should give you some reward."
A hand, warm and calloused, slid over his stomach, fingers tracing the soft skin beneath his thin t-shirt. Up and down, a rhythmic caress. The velvety texture of his skin, a forgotten sensation, registered somewhere distant. A wet kiss landed on his neck, sending a shiver of revulsion through him, while the other hand stroked his arm, lingering on the nascent muscle. He was a grown man now, the touch seemed to acknowledge.
"It's been years since I touched you like this last time, remember?" The words whispered against his earlobe, hot and damp.
Andras froze, every muscle locked, a statue of dread. His mind screamed, a cacophony of protest, yet his body remained immobile. He knew what this meant. He knew, but he couldn't move, couldn't protest, couldn't disobey. Then, a voice, sharp as ice, pierced the fog in his mind, vibrating through his ear canal, chilling him to the bone.
"Kill him." The command, calm and clear, sliced through the rising panic.
His thoughts reeled, fighting the insidious suggestion.
"No, concentrate... But I don't want it, dad..."
The words formed, a silent plea, trapped behind a metaphorically sewn mouth. His father's hand, now beneath his shirt, explored his naked belly. The warmth of it, a gross, disturbing heat, spread across his skin.
"The pen... The blue pen... No, I prefer the red one..." His mind flitted, a desperate escape from the encroaching violation.
Should he? Should he kill his "father"? A perverse sense of 'yes' warred with the 'no' he wanted to scream.
"Holy fuck, I don't want to experience it again, it's painful, and dirty!!!!!" The silent scream echoed in his skull.
The hand crept higher, past his navel, towards his chest, his right nipple. Fingers brushed, a light, teasing pressure.
"YOU WANT IT? NO! SO JUST PUT THAT FUCKING PEN INTO HIS THROAT!!!" The unknown sound hammered against his cochlea again, more urgent, more insistent.
This time, Andras didn't hesitate. His hand darted out, seizing the red pen from his desk. He brought it down, not into his father's throat, but his own. A searing stab, then another, and another, a furious, desperate frenzy.
"Andras! What are you doing?!" His father's shout ripped through the air, sharp with sudden horror. "Stop it!!! I said STOP!!!" He lunged, gripping Andras' wrist, pulling his hand away from his own mangled throat.
"Red colour is unrivalled, I couldn't tell is it my blood? Or is it the red ink." His mind, detached, registered the vibrant crimson staining his skin, the pen, the desk.
"Fuck, this dumbass, what should I do now...?" His father's voice, thick with panic, pulled his hand away from Andras' throat, tossing the red pen across the room. But it was too late. Andras' body went slack, a lifeless weight. His eyes, devoid of spirit, stared straight ahead, a vacant gaze fixed on his father. A wave of gut-wrenching guilt washed over the man. Driven by a sudden, perverse urge, he snatched the red pen from where it had fallen, plunging it into Andras's eye socket, then the other, popping the eyeballs free.
Better.
He lifted Andras, cradling the dead weight gently, a strange tenderness in his movements. He carried him to the kitchen, careful not to let the blood stain his clothes. On the cold, stainless steel counter, he laid the body down. With a precision born of strange hunger, he selected the choicest cuts: the thigh, rich with muscle, the tenderloin of the back, and, of course, the member. He carved a sliver of raw flesh, crimson and glistening, and brought it to his lips.
Tasty.
After he'd stored all the rich meat in the fridge — wrapped in plastic, neat and careful, the way you'd wrap up leftover roast on a Sunday evening — he took out a hammer from the toolbox under the sink. Honest work. He brought it down on the bones, on the skull, trying to crush them into something like meal, something that could dissolve into dirt and be forgotten. But the bones only cracked. They splintered. A shard of rib skittered across the basement floor like a finger pointing at him. They would not powder. They refused to powder, as if some last stubborn part of the boy was holding on, whispering no, you don't get to unmake me.
A fury took him — hot, red, stupid. He snatched up a metacarpal and flung it sidearm at the mirror on the far wall. The glass exploded, all those silver pieces raining down with a sound like a chandelier giving up on life, and for one long moment he saw himself in every shard. A hundred Felix Marquises on the floor, each one wearing that same hollowed-out expression. A hundred fathers. A hundred murderers.
He lay down. Not by choice — his legs simply quit, the way legs do when the mind has briefly, terribly, accepted what the hands have done. He lay there among the glass and the bone and he breathed.
Then he stood up again. Because that's what people do. Even the worst of them. Especially the worst of them. They stand up, because stopping means thinking, and thinking means understanding, and understanding means the kind of action he should take.
He grabbed the skeleton by the ankles — so light now, so horribly light without the meat, and dragged it through the kitchen, over the squeaking linoleum, out the back door and into the yard where the night air was cool and full of cricket-song and... a manservant?
He dug. Three feet. Maybe four. His back protested — he was fifty-six, and fifty-six-year-old spines were not built for this work, not at this hour — but he kept at it until the hole was deep enough. Deep enough. How deep is deep enough, when you're burying your own son? A question without an answer. He rolled the remains in, shoveled the dirt back, packed it flat with the back of the spade, and that was that.
Almost.
He'd kept two bones. Both humeri — thick, dense, full of marrow. Good for stock. He didn't love to waste things, Felix Marquis. A practical man. Use everything. Save the rubber bands. Reuse the tinfoil. Use every part of the animal.
You could tell, couldn't you?
But the guilt was there. More than he'd expected, more than he thought he was still capable of. He was cracking. Not fast, not dramatically, but the way a house settles over decades, a fracture here, a sag there. He believed he was sane. He held onto that belief the way a drowning man holds onto a piece of driftwood, and maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't, and maybe the difference had stopped mattering.
And here was another thing worth thinking about, if you had the stomach for it:
When Andras had been screaming — and he had screamed, screamed the way only the young can, with every ounce of air and every volt of terror their bodies contain — the neighbours heard. They must have. The walls of these old houses were thick, but not that thick. Not thick enough to swallow a boy's dying.
Mercy, they might have whispered. Have mercy on that boy. Oh, Felix Marquis. But prayers cost nothing, and that's exactly what they're worth when they come without action. They prayed, or they didn't, and either way they pulled the covers to their chins and did nothing. No correct action. No action at all.
Late that night — the kind of late where the ticking of the kitchen clock sounds like footsteps in an empty hallway — Felix stood at the counter, slicing meat. Thin, even strips, precise, the way his mother had taught him decades ago, but's no longer a chicken. He laid them into the pot one by one, each piece meeting the water with a soft, wet kiss. A single humerus rested among them, pale as driftwood, leaning against the side of the pot.
He turned the burner to medium. Watched the surface begin to tremble.
"Oh — delish, delish, Andras," he hummed, and the sound of his own son's name in his own mouth, aimed at the pot, made something behind his eyes flinch. But he pushed through it. Pushing through was what Felix Marquis did.
Then the phone rang.
That shrill, old-fashioned brrring sliced through the kitchen and ruined everything — the quiet, the ritual, the careful numbness he'd been wrapping around himself. He slammed the spoon down, stomped to Andras' bedroom — still Andras' bedroom, still full of his posters and his books and that smell of teenage boy that hadn't faded yet — and snatched up the yellowed telephone from the nightstand. The cord was tangled, the way Andras always left it, no matter how many times he'd been told.
"Andras' dad here. Speak," he said, his voice like a rusted hinge.
"Oh, hi, uh — I'm Vincent. Vincent Ricard? You might have heard of me — "
"No greetings. No introductions. What do you want?"
A nervous pause. Quick little breaths on the other end. "Where's Andras? I need to talk to him about something."
"He's asleep."
"Oh. Then — tomorrow?"
"Yeah. Tomorrow. Now I'm busy. Beat it."
Click. He set the receiver down and stood in the dark of his son's room. The posters watched him — some band in black eyeliner he'd never understood. The stuffed bear on the shelf watched him with its one remaining button eye. Everything watched him, or seemed to, and he turned away from all of it and walked back to the kitchen.
The pot was simmering. A thin curl of steam rose from it, and the smell — the smell was good. It smelled like Sunday soup. Like his mother's kitchen in winter. Like something wholesome, and that was perhaps the most terrible thing of all.
He sat down at the table. Picked up his spoon.
"Heh." A sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt, living in the ugly territory between the two. "Tomorrow. In your dreams, kid."
He raised the broth to his lips. Blew on it. Sipped.
"Part of him will be inside me tonight."
He said it to no one. To the empty kitchen, to the ticking clock, to the humerus poking above the waterline like a pale periscope from a vessel that had gone down in dark waters and would never surface again, perhaps the manservant. He bit into the meat — dark, tender, falling apart on his tongue the way good braised meat does — and he chewed slowly, and he swallowed, and he took another bite.
The clock ticked. The pot simmered. Outside, the dirt settled over what remained of Andras Marquis, and the crickets sang, and the neighbours slept, and the world kept turning the way it always does, indifferent and endless, no matter what happens in some kitchen on some quiet street where nobody ever sees a thing.
The next day, Vincent came to visit Andras.
He knew he'd likely get an earful from the father — everyone in the neighbourhood knew about Felix Marquis and his temper, but he came anyway. Some things matter more than the risk, or at least they do when you're young enough to still believe that. He walked up the porch steps, knocked lightly on the door, and offered a careful "Hello?" to the silence on the other side. Then he waited, hands out of his pockets, trying to look respectful, trying to look like the kind of boy a man like Felix couldn't find a reason to hate.
Moments passed. Then a shape appeared behind the frosted glass of the door — dark, blurred, moving slowly, the way shapes do in bad dreams. Vincent's chest lifted. "Might be Andras," But when the door opened, it wasn't Andras standing there. It was Felix, filling the doorframe, his face set in that permanent scowl that seemed less like an expression and more like a condition.
"Mi (Mister) — Mr. Felix..." Vincent stuttered, and swallowed. "Good afternoon."
"What do you want this time?" That grumpy, creaking voice, again.
"I want to see Andras," he said, and he said it carefully, the way you'd set down a glass you knew was already cracked. "If that's okay...?"
"He's grounded." Felix's face darkened another shade, which shouldn't have been possible but somehow was. "I don't allow you lot to come around here distracting him from his studies. Get lost!"
Vincent flinched. He took a step back, and in stepping back he did the thing he shouldn't have done — he breathed in. A deep breath, involuntary, the kind your body takes when fear squeezes your lungs and then releases them all at once.
The smell hit him.
It was faint but unmistakable, drifting out from the dark hallway behind Felix like a secret the house was too tired to keep. Unpleasant. Wrong. A metallic sweetness, like rust, like old pennies left in a wet hand, like — but not quite. Close to iron oxide, close to something rotting in a warm place, but not exactly either of those things. It was the kind of smell that your brain can't comprehend.
Oh, silly Felix. He hadn't cleaned the blood. After everything he'd done the day before — the butchering, the wrapping, the burying — he hadn't thought to mop the floor, to open the windows, to scrub down the surfaces where a boy had been taken apart like a machine being stripped for parts. Maybe he hadn't gotten around to it. Or maybe — and this was the worse thought — maybe Felix simply didn't see the point. Maybe, in the quiet arithmetic of his madness, cleaning up had never even made the list.
But Vincent didn't know any of that. Vincent only knew the smell was wrong, and that Felix was looking at him with eyes that dared him to mention it.
Before he could say another word, the door slammed — hard, fast, a gunshot of wood against wood that missed his nose by an inch and sent a puff of that terrible air across his face. From inside, muffled but clear, came Felix's voice:
"Scram, kiddo!"
Vincent stood there. Just stood there, on the porch, in the afternoon light, with that smell still sitting in his nostrils and a feeling in his gut that he couldn't name and wouldn't be able to name for a long time, if ever. Something was wrong in that house. Something beyond Felix's temper, beyond Andras being grounded, beyond anything he had a framework for. He could feel it — not with his mind, but with his common sense, with the small hairs on his arms, just like the superhero.
He stepped back. One step, then another. Then he turned and walked away down the path, shoulders slumped, hands back in his pockets, disappointment sitting on him like a wet coat — because he was still young enough, still innocent enough, to believe that what he was feeling was only disappointment, but not guilt.
The porch watched him go. The house watched him go. And behind the frosted glass, the dark shape of Felix Marquis watched him go, and did not move from the doorway until the boy had turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Phew, silly Felix. What a close call, he successfully sent another one to the promised land...