psy·cho·dra·ma

The table’s set for four. Kitchen is meatloaf scents, gravid with warm-rolls smell. 

Suburbia. Upper middle class life. Good life.

    [n. a method of group psychotherapy in which participants take roles in improvisational dramatizations of emotionally charged situations.]

    – Random House Webster’s Unabridged, pg. 1561

Or is it?

For the Millers any shade of good dissolved when “the switch” happened. The switch was Dad’s idea.

The new institution is cracking everyone. Mom’s at baseball practice. This angers Bobby; he thinks, She has it easy. Not easy for Bobby and his sister Becky.

And Mom has been weaseling out of her role’s requirements since the start. Dad drops her off at Bobby’s school and she waits until he pulls away to hide in the bushes until school and practice are over.

Mom never went into the school, which keeps the horror at home lush and bleedy.

So Mom pretends to do homework. Dad chews thoughtfully, masticating whipped potatoes and cooked carrots into a ruminative mash. He has pterodactyl swag.

Bobby made the dinner. He had to learn to cook like Mom in order to become Mom. Bobby’s cooking gets better as the frequency of beatings, burnings, and straightrazor scorings increases. Role swapping is stabilized and maintained through bruises and shed blood.

“How was school today, Bobby?”

Mom is Bobby now – her son’s red baseball cap like a tourniquet crushing blonde curls and skull skin – so she answers: “Fine, Dad.” Says it soft like a cancer victim. She has yet to master mimicking Bobby’s prepubescent voice.

“Tell me what you learned.”

Mom details her imaginary day at school. Becky stirs beneath the table. She’s on all fours, nude except for the black dog collar around her neck. It used to be Pancake’s collar, the Millers’ Yorkie. Sister and dog were role-switched. This didn’t go smoothly, human to canine and vice versa. Pancake twitches nervously in Becky’s seat, uncomfortable with Becky’s miniskirt and neon tank top draped over it loosely. The dog’s mouth is gunky with red lipstick. The Yorkie doesn’t eat like Becky did, which infuriates Dad. Pancake sloshes her plated food around, messes up the tablecloth. Dad has to pummel and thrash the dog regularly. To get it to stay still in the chair. She whines and whimpers and eventually goes still though shivering. Wide-eyed, beaten sedate – too terrified to eat or move.

Identity isn’t indissoluble. This household proves it.

Dad had to strangle Becky and hit her with a stun gun to modify her behavior from teengirl to doglike. Becky’s initial defiance became outrage, animal outrage as her humanity fled, and faded into despair, submission, and, lastly, some broken belief. Dad will be arrested eventually; he walks Becky at night, yanking his daughter-now-dog naked around on a leash. Someone will see; call the cops.

She shits and pisses in the backyard, Becky does. She eats canned dog grub out of the dirty orange bowl and licks Dad’s shiny black shoes and curls up on his lap as he reads the Wall Street Journal. 

Before she went mute, when Becky would accidentally speak human, Dad would kick her ribs black. He’d punt her across the kitchen, shooting her like a flesh puck into the smash of the coffee table. Writhing, bloody family. The girl deemed “Most Attractive” in her freshman yearbook is gnawing on a filth-encrusted rubber bone toy; it squeaks when she bites it.

Becky’s devolved utterly; she barks when she wants something, and Dad is content. Becky is licking the linoleum; Pancake is eating meatloaf.

“This is delicious, Susan,” Dad says, forking a bite of apple pie.

Mom’s name was Susan. But Bobby knows he is Mom now. He is Susan.

“Thank you, dear,” the boy says to his father, his “Mom voice” awkward, strained. Eight-year-old boywife. Dad is honey or dear.

Bobby wears Mom’s dresses and panties and Dad’s fists enforce.

The family hides Dad’s warped role-reversal. Instinctually. Mom doesn’t show up at school squeezed into Bobby’s clothes. Becky, when chained to the tree in the backyard, doesn’t yell to the neighbors for help. Bobby vacuums and cooks, and never calls 911. Groceries are delivered to the house.

Why doesn’t the deliveryman question the boy in drag?

The stench of feces fouls the meatloaf aroma. It’s raining cats and Beckys outside, so instead of enduring the mud and cold, Becky shat and pissed under the table. Bobby knows what will happen.

“Pancake,” Dad says. “Did you make a potty in the house?”

The Yorkie, thinking it’s being addressed, barks once. Dad backhands the dog into a shatter of drying dishes. A few break; the dog hits the floor and makes nervous circles on the linoleum.

Becky whimpers.

“Bad!” Dad overturns the kitchen table. Silverware clatters and food spills from their containers. He drags Becky into the living room and beats her bare back red with the TV remote. Mom and Bobby don’t watch, their heads bowed.

Bobby thinks, Stupid dog – blood trickles down Becky’s cheeks – then remembers it’s his sister and not a pet.

Topsy-turvy.

Dad is mushing Becky’s face into the pile of black, watery diarrhea. Blood mixes with the shit.

Everything inverted. The dog circles faster, made psycho and stupid by the chaos.

It’s bedtime and Bobby is Mom is Wife. Eight-year-old boy in black panties and a slip. Bobby hears Dad down the hall, in Bobby’s former room, where Mom is Bobby is Son sleeps. The walls are thin – thinner than people’s certainty about who and what they are.

DAD

Why aren’t you in bed, young man?

MOM

I couldn’t sleep, Daddy.

DAD

I have to work in the morning, Bobby. And you have school.

MOM

Daddy. Please don’t –

DAD

I received a letter from school today. Says you haven’t attended in months. Do you want to explain this?

MOM

I was, Dad. I was in school I –

DAD

(Dad’s belt is removed with a slither)

You lie right to my face, don’t you?

Bobby hears flesh lashed. Hears the belt’s buckle strike bone. Welts. Blood. He knows what these sounds indicate.

None of the Millers know what happened to Dad. Whether it was an event or just something that snapped between his ears. Ten months ago he began acting strange, staying at work very late and screaming with fright at the grass growing in the front yard, paralyzed beside the lawnmower. One month before the switch, Dad stopped speaking; it was like a placidity preceding detonation. A scary, hushed period. Then he started looking at the order of his family, and he didn’t like what he saw.

The digital alarm clock beside the marriage bed is glowing red numerals in the black like a cybernetic devil’s eyes. Dad’s collar is flecked with blood drops as he undresses. 

“A wonderful meal tonight, Susan.” Dad’s wristwatch is slid off. Time red and evil and time falling.

Bobby almost says Thanks, Dad, but corrects himself in time. Bobby has nightmares of being mauled to wet shreds by a grizzly bear. The bear has Dad’s face and Dad’s cock. 

You smell so good, Susan. Mmm.

The Vaseline is smeared between Bobby’s cheeks. He shrieks as Dad fucks him; it feels like being split by a dinosaur-sized boning knife.

In the morning, Mom looks worse than ever before. Her face is a swollen purple sack, black and dark red, lumpy, destroyed. Her lips are plump, split violet caterpillars. Crumpled nose. Facial lacerations.

Your head looks like it came out of a trash compactor.

Dead quiet breakfast. Son wearing Mom’s rose robe. Pancake stares stupidly at its plate of pancakes. Becky is in the living room gnawing on a red rubber fire hydrant chew toy.

“You have Little League this morning,” Dad says between bites of scrambled eggs. “I’m going to make sure you go this time, young man.”

Mom is constricted in son’s baseball uniform.

Mom almost speaks but her throat is sore from being choked.

Dad kisses his son/wife goodbye

Susan thinks, Well, at least this will be the end of it.

She walks in a daze from Dad’s humming Honda CR-V toward the baseball diamond and shiny sun. Dad is waiting in the car, watching her to make sure she participates. It’s kind of like a death march for Susan.

Cheering and aluminum bats bonking balls – normal sounds.

The coach is wearing a red windbreaker. He has a clipboard.

“Bobby Miller, coach,” Susan says through cut lips, her speech mumbled into the language of damage. “Here for practice.”

The coach turns around and his wind-burnt half-smile dissolves. He squints. “Susan?”

Susan, a 42-year-old woman, is squeezed into the Little League uniform like some ill-conceived stripper’s outfit. And yet the strange attire is the thing the coach finds least disturbing about what he sees.

Susan’s face bones are blatantly shattered, and have drifted to unnatural locations where swelling purple blooms. Balloon lips. Dried blood and fresher blood. Her collar bone’s depression is a little pond of blood.

She is deformed.

“What the hell happened to you?”

Her face looks like it went through a windshield at 55 MPH.

“I was being a son,” she says.