Shred My Face Off Bro

Dale's mom has been abducted by an insane man who knows the red painted electric guitar that Dale's had his eye on at the local music store.

Within the space of a few hours the whole house had seemed to change. The color of the drapes dimmed to a sludge like drip. The coffee in the kitchen appeared blacker than when it had been first brewed that morning, and lights were on, but their glow had a frenetic pulse that looked like the very essence of anxiety. Night time had started to move in through the window.

Dale felt as young as he ever had, sitting, alone. In his room were a thousand thoughts and in every corner seemed to be the terrible excitement of hope ready to pounce at any moment. He wondered how long he had been sitting alone like this, and he couldn’t hear the police officers downstairs talking to his father about the “plan” anymore. He wanted to go to his father, but he didn’t want to make him think that he needed any explanation. Not from him. It was another man that Dale was more interested in talking to. Apparently, as far as he could gather, and that was as far as the police had glimpsed the face of him, a man had kidnapped his mom that morning while she was walking to her car from her morning pedicure appointment. But the abduction had only lasted for a moment or so. At the moment it remained an imprisonment. About a hundred police were gathered around every centimeter of the 50 yard perimeter of a house only 5 blocks away.

The man had done it in broad daylight. Eyewitnesses placed him outside the nail parlor before it even opened. Dale’s mom being the premeditated victim was unclear. Probably not likely. His father only knew of the man through the stories of friends 5 blocks away who would be awoken in the middle of the night by the booming crack of something metal snapping with tremendous force. Often there would be a scream or two. Maybe a yelp or a hoot. At least that’s how the neighbors described it from their vantage point at the next house over. They had only seen him a handful of times. He was skinny and the day he kidnapped Dale’s mom wasn’t an anomaly in terms of the clothing choices he had made that morning because he had always worn black when they had seen him the maybe 7 total times in the last 5 years. But those times had only occurred when he had first moved in. That was when long piano concerto’s were the only thing making Mrs. Neighbor beg and plead for Mr. Neighbor to go over there and do something about it so that they could both for the love of god and the Seattle Seahawks get some sleep already. That stopped after a few months however, so Mrs. Neighbor did as well. Dale’s father had used their name a few times, Dale just couldn’t retain it because of its utter sterile conformity to the classic American normal last name pantheon. The Johnson’s, Smith’s? It might have been Bush or something monosyllabic like that.

Another eyewitness had identified him by address because of the thousands of transactions he had conducted with the man for piano wire that had become so commonplace in his life he said he felt like a f*****g partner with the guy. He could almost recite his debit card. He said that he almost had to ban the man from returning because he wouldn’t stop getting blood on the piano keys, and it was just not cool, even if the man would give any customer’s who happened to be in the store at the time a virtuosic performance worthy of a MacArthur Fellowship. His hair was the most penultimate usage of the word “unkempt.” And he looked like he had the frame of some type of Olympian gymnast under the black pants and sweater.

Dale’s father had told him to not watch the Television or go out to the front lawn. He wasn’t being punished, he said, but the reporters were everywhere, like puke in the backseat.

The police man had told them both. His mother had been abducted. Police gave chase but couldn’t catch them before she had been taken inside the house. They had made no contact so far, but the intelligence gathered seems to indicate that there is some kind of wire pulled tight in every room in the house. The doors and windows weren’t barricaded, so much as they were pulled shut by thousands of pounds of tense metal string. There was no view into the basement and the storm door was thickly padlocked. The SWAT team was ready for anything but this, at least that’s what the look in the police man’s eye said as he answered that yes, the SWAT team has prepared a plan to make entry and neutralize the situation.

Dale laid down, but he felt as if sleep was a newly made cardinal sin. He lay there and started to think about his mom. He started to miss her, and it was completely new and horrible, he tried not to cry, not to look back at this day and lament that he had been weak.

Then the phone rang. Dale didn’t move, then he sprang up.

He was down the stairs and the cops were still there, standing and sitting while they listened to Dale’s father on the phone. Dale’s father looked to Dale, then his face twisted into fear like he was witnessing Dale being consumed by fire. All the shades were drawn tight and white light poured between the cracks from the combination of local news vans, police cars, and one thousand watt Fresnel lights on stands for the cameras, all pointed at the front door.

Dale’s father stopped talking and lowered the phone. Had he ever met this man at the music shop, he asked. Dale doesn’t think so. Are you always asking to play the bright red Fender Stratocaster with the cherry oak fret board from the top shelf, he asked next. Yes, Dale said, every week. A police man who had been on the phone in the kitchen came in putting his cell phone away and staring at Dale. What, Dale asked.

The police man moved their stone wall of bodies aside as quietly as the wind. Dale’s father led him, holding his hand, to the backyard. Dale’s father reminded him, he was safe, there were snipers everywhere, and indeed there were, Dale saw one looking down a scope from a treehouse over the fence in a neighbors yard. There were huge lights on stands raised all the way up over the fence, and every foot along the top of the fence was a police’s head and shoulder’s training a gun on the wild haired man, standing in the middle of the lawn, holding a pistol himself, pointing it however at Dale’s mom, sitting in a chair in front of him, hands bound behind her.

Dale’s father led Dale around them, and that’s when Dale saw it as they circled the yard, the red Fender Stratocaster, looking beautiful and free, leaning against a single speaker tube amp a few feet away from his mother’s freshly manicured toenails.

They stopped at the back of the yard, Dale and his father. There was silence. Dale’s father asked how a recluse could keep his lawn so neat. The man replied in a booming deep voice, that’s funny, without any shred of evidence that sarcasm had ever been invented at all.

Dale calmly walks to the red Fender Stratocaster. He looks to his mom, and then to the man. He can see now how bloody and scarred the man’s hands are, like they had been lashed by a thousand tiny whips. The man’s face was eerily still, like it was prehistoric stone carved by erosion but still permanent compared to how long you or I will live. His pupils were swimming, Dale s**t’s you not, in two little green whirlpools. Dale sees his mom choking back words, but, she looks proud.

Dale pulls the guitar strap over his head. He holds the cherry wood fret board in his grasp. The man waits. Before Dale’s mom can blurt out a suggestion, like, honey play the one- he’s off.

He starts off slow, but rhythmic. An ascending string skipping arpeggio.

He grips the neck tighter now, drawing it into him, then he strums, and the chord is biblical, an epic flood of the first century.

Now it’s his solo, and Dale’s head goes quiet. He closes his eyes and feels his hands move somewhere below him. It is perfect, he tells the story of his first memory and what he thinks about the bus stop every morning before school and what phantasmagorical woman he longs to please with song and how no one could ever touch him at this very moment.

He opens his eyes as his fingers hit the last 24^th fret bend, screaming out of the amp like an eagle out of the sun. It fades, he looks to the man and sees his jaw is loose and hanging like a piece of gelatin from a spoon, and he’s dropped the gun to his side and let his shoulders collapse, his eyes are closed and he’s swaying. He opens his eye’s. He looks around. He looks at himself, his hands, he can’t believe it. He’s returned to a body that was once all his but has been beaten and misused by another.

He looks back to Dale, disbelieving, eye’s just normal green again. Thank you, he says, I don’t know what I’ve done. He turns the gun on himself and retreats back to the house, back down the open storm door before all the Kings men can tumble off the wall. Dale lays the guitar back at the amp and it begins to squeal with feedback as he unties his mom. His father is there now carrying her. All is quiet chaos as they run, until Dale hears a huge TWANG. He turns in time to see the whole house shred itself like a spring-loaded top, piano strings whipping through the walls like the blades of a vertical combine, and a scream from within fades as quickly as it came.

© 2014 John E. O'Brien

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Carl Drake Barnard

wOW!!! What a great story!! Loved it!!! well done ANd I loved the opening and then how the story got more and more interesting :) And the intensity OMG Awesome well done! WEll written indeed and well thought of :) Epic :)