If you had asked Todd, when he was first wrestling with his desires, which possibility he thought was worse–being gay, or having everyone think you were gay–he would have said the latter. Being gay was only secondary to the fact that, in the mind of the small town where he grew up, he checked all of the gay boxes. Short and lithe, high voice with a slight lisp, pale skin and thick lips–he was a faggot to the world regardless of who he wanted to fuck. For better or worse, he happened to like dick on top of that. His father essentially disowned him, his older brother, Kyle, and his friends tormented him at school, and shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he’d stolen 200 dollars from his father’s wallet and run away to the closest city, imagining it had to be better than this dump. No one cared that he had gone, and no one cared to know what had happened to him. What mattered most, was that he wasn’t there anymore–the town had done its job, and had preserved itself. Within the year, he was forgotten by most, and the few who did remember him–particularly his father and brother–saw no reason to ever discuss him again. As far as they were concerned, he might as well be dead, and so they carried on.
It was eight years later, on a sunny Saturday morning in late April, that a greyhound pulled into the depot off main street one morning, and one person got off, carrying no baggage, just the clothes on his back. No one recognized Todd. The gangly young boy had grown taller, but stayed thin, the hair he’d always kept long was shaved close to his scalp, he had blond scruff on his chin and cheeks. To this day, no one in town knows where Todd had lived or what he had done to survive for those years he was away. They did know why he came back, in the end. Todd had a few scores to settle, both with his family and the town that had failed him, and he’d decided it was time to collect.
He cracked the knuckles of both hands, the leather gloves he was wearing flexing as he did, reached into a pocket and pulled out a cigar. As he walked down the street he lit it, smoking it slowly as he walked down the familiar road, seeing which shops had closed, and which were still there. Like many towns, the years had hollowed it out–all of the young blood which could leave, had–just like Todd–though most had gone to college and simply never returned. Those who remained were invested in this place, in an imagined purity of it. It was a place Todd would have never been allowed to survive, but it could change. It would change. He would change it.
No one recognized him, and he no longer looked to be out of place, beyond his status as a stranger in a closeknit community. People passing him by assumed he was one of many young men who tended to arrive during the Spring and Summer for seasonal work up in the nearby mountains, either planting trees, or cutting them down. He cut down a sidestreet, headed for his father’s house. He’d placed a call there the week before, while he was planning his return, just to make sure they hadn’t moved, and of course they hadn’t. His father wasn’t going to be pried from his house until he was dead–it wasn’t a slight, that was something he had said on any number of occasions. He loved his house and he loved this town, and everyone knew him by name–Mr. Edwin Lobart–it was a shame, to Todd, that he’d never loved his family the same way.
He gave a rough knock on the front door, but as he’d expected no one was home. His brother had gotten married a few years back to some woman he’d known in high school–Todd hadn’t been invited, of course, but he’d observed it from afar on facebook. His father was rarely home on Saturdays–he was at the farmer’s market, manning the city table as a councilman, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, his eye on the mayoral race this coming fall. He’d likely be home in early afternoon, but Todd could wait. It would give him a moment to take a look around.
Little had changed since he’d left. In fact, he was surprised by just how little had changed. He felt like an entirely different person, and simply being in this space was like a haunting of some past he’d outgrown long before. Everything was smaller than he remembered, when the whole world had seemed to loom over him. Upstairs, his room was storage now–his old things and other detritus stored away in boxes, the furniture long since sold off at garage sales. He ran his gloved hands over the dusty surface, and then wiped them off on the curtain before leaving the room. He found a bowl in the kitchen to use as an ashtray, and knocked off a sizable cinder. Back in the den, he grabbed hold of his father’s recliner–still the same old sunken La-Z-Boy after all of these years–and spun it around, away from the TV and towards the front door. He pulled a side table with the bowl beside him, and kept smoking, one leg over the other, booted foot swinging, relaxing and waiting for the sound of a key in the door, which would announce his father’s return home.
It was an hour and a half later, with Todd halfway through his second cigar, bored and groping himself, that he heard the click. He leaned back, one gloved hand still on his crotch, feeling how excited his hands had become–or his gloves, really. The material had tightened against his hands, and was shivering slightly. They could feel their Master’s excitement as well. The door opened and Edwin stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and then noticed the furniture had been rearranged, and a relative stranger was sitting in his chair, smoking a cigar.
Bracken's Corner 