Help Me

I never talked to my parents much. They weren’t around while I was growing up.

Ski trips.

Cruises.

Resorts.

Land up north.

Hunting: twice in the winter, once in the spring, once in the summer, and four times in the fall.

They didn’t ask me to come along. They never said, “Hey, Francis, how about you come up to the cabins, and we’ll teach you how to shoot.” Or “How about you come with us to the Bahamas, and we will show you surfing and snorkeling.”

Hell no.

Post Cards.

Two long distance calls in total that I can remember.

There were pages on pages of pictures of my parents in a scrap book that would make the viewer believe that they didn’t have any children at all.

Not a single one.

There were Strange, foreign gifts that’ve laid dormant in my childhood room that I’ve seen from time to time when arriving back for a holiday.

When I came home after college.

When I first met Renee, the love of my life, she’d begged incessantly for months to meet them, to see where I came from. Whatever the hell that even means. She was smitten, an absolute sucker for the way that successful relationships naturally progress. I didn’t give a damn as long as we continued to screw each other’s brains out.

We fucked in my childhood room.

You ever do that? It’s kind of thrilling. Off topic but thrilling.

Renee didn’t understand what I’d been trying to tell her until she met them. She couldn’t comprehend their indifference towards their only son. Surprisingly, it made our relationship stronger.

We didn’t go back much after we bought a house of our own.

Like I said.

Holidays.

Funerals.

Celebrations of life and God-awful family reunions.

Of course, the next step happened in the progression of life. Tyler was born.

Our son.

My boy.

When he first arrived, I believed my parents would treat him the same as I. It was to be expected.

But they didn’t.

They surprised me.

They were the opposite.

There was love.

There was gratitude.

He changed them.

Go figure, right? He changed me as well.

He pooped, they cleaned it.

He cried, they swaddled him.

They sang … I heard my father sing for the first time in my life. He wasn’t bad.

“Thank you.” My mother grabbed Renee’s arm. There were tears in her eyes and Renee was just as dumbfounded as I.

I learned that grandbabies could change their grandparents. They can break down those calcified, deeply rooted walls and flaws, and those walls fell.

My son got older.

I witnessed their relationship bloom and I wasn’t jealous.

Fathers don’t get to be jealous of their children.

It’s the night before my son went to stay at my childhood home.

A vacation.

Renee and I are leaving him for the first time ever to go on our own adventure. Renee is four months pregnant and we are having a girl. This will be the last opportunity for us to travel — the time before every breath she takes will be a constant struggle to maintain that seed growing inside of her.

I checked on my son before I began to pack my bag.

He was sleeping.

I looked out into the yard, into moonlit forest and it all came back to me. A truck filled with memory punching me in the gut and making me believe that I could taste blood. For twenty years, I’d been trying to forget.

The woods.

The bike.

Red stars.

Black.

The bones at the mouth.

How many bones are inside of the human body?

206.

A moose?

Around 200.

A deer?

327.

A rabbit?

210.

I know, you’d have figured humans would’ve had more bones than a rabbit, right? Look it up if you don’t believe me. And if you believe I’m getting a little out of my own head here —buckle up.

There was a graveyard of those bones at the edge of a black mouth.

A cave.

The mouth was a cave.

I remember it all now.

The bike was a present given to me on my fifth birthday. Of course it was, my parents never considered a five-year-old couldn’t ride a grown man’s bike.

I remember looking at it when it was first revealed and pretending that they’d given me the best present that’s ever been given. The bike sat in our garage for many years collecting specks of dust and rat feces but none of that stopped me from oiling her up and finally taming her at the age of twelve.

I rode downtown.

I rode in the neighbor’s driveways.

I rode within abandoned factories and amusement parks.

I rode in both graveyards, the one close and the one that took every ounce of my strength to get up that damn, unrelenting hill.

I rode to my friends’ houses, even if their parents persisted in giving me a ride, I rode.

I rode when it snowed.

I rode when it rained.

I rode when it was so hot I could’ve sworn I was going to drown in the sweat that my body emitted.

I rode in the dark without a night light to guide the way.

The night.

The day.

It made no difference.

But my favorite place to ride was in those woods.

Apple orchards, lakes, rivers, mountains, partially hidden anfractuosities that made the ride even more treacherous and therefore rewarding.

The wind stroked my hair because I never wore a helmet.

Helmets are for pussies.

My parents were gone— I know, go figure. They were off on one of their trips, gallivanting themselves in some luxurious isle as if it were their appointed duty to leave me alone. I said fuck ‘em, I still do that from time to time. I wonder if Tyler feels the same way about me.

I hopped on my bike and decided I was going to drive further than I’d ever gone.

The wilderness.

A daunting word if you really think about it, especially for the "little people."

Old English slang:

Wilde. Deor.

Beast.

Animal.

Deer.

327 bones in the body of a deer.

A place of wild beasts.

A place where the only ones that can hear you scream, want to eat you and that scream.

It was warm and sunny. There wasn’t a cloud in the eye of blue above, and I closed my eyes while traversing the leaves and sticks that blocked my path. There were grooves in the trees, claw marks. Some oozed and bubbled their blood from a wound of winter splitting. There were bugs that crawled up my wrists and buzzed beside my ears while begging for some spare blood.

I passed the orchard, giving it a nod as if to say ‘goodbye, you will be missed.’

I passed the stream that I’d sometimes catch perch in. Their spikes stabbed my hands and for a while I believed they were poisonous because no one was there to tell me otherwise.

I rode until there were no more paths. There was just me, and there was the forest. The wilderness. The wild. A place of wild beasts.

I howled and screamed in my solitude; I didn’t see the drop off I was heading towards like a bullet. I went head over my handlebars and fell onto moist soil that was filled with extra rocks. It was only when I opened my eyes to assess the damage that I realized they weren’t rocks.

How many bones linger within the human body?

Bones.

Petrified calcium spilling out from a hole in the ground, almost too small to be considered a cave but surely it was. It was a black eye, Vanta, dark enough to absorb the idea of summer. My bike, laying on its side in front of me, begging for help.

Something pulled from inside.

I couldn’t see what it was…

a hand, a mouth, a tail, I didn’t know.

But my bike was swallowed by the dark hole.

I tried to move, but once I did, there was a tearing sensation within my shin up to my knee and I realized that blood had already spilled into my shoe.

Split down the middle, my tibia was chipped and open. The shock of the initial blow was beginning to fade away, and the sting of recent trauma took over and percolated in the center of my brain where it would hurt the most.

I cried.

And when I did, whatever was sucking my bike into the hole stopped at once.

I crawled backwards; I needed to move away. I didn’t know what from, but when the smell of rotten excrement began to waft from the sunken gravesite, I moved quicker. Ignoring the bone lingering out of my skin and pinching against the flesh, shocking me like a fucked-up game of Operation.

And then it came to me in the form of a little girl’s unabashed voice.

Clear as day.

“Help me.”

I turned back to look.

There was nothing there but my bicycle. A little sliver penetrated the hole ever so slightly and there was a part of me that wanted to retrieve it because it was all that I had.

“Help me.”

That little, mysterious girl spoke again.

That is, I think it was the voice of a girl. But you see, now that I’m a father, I’ve realized that little girl’s and little boy’s voices are very similar when they are still outside the clutches of adolescence.

“Help me.

I would’ve.

I wanted to.

I thought about it.

But I’d banged up my left leg too much to be spelunking into cave systems to save little voices that needed rescuing.

“Hello?” I said it, leaning forward and feeling the unrelenting grip of nausea taking hold of my stomach. This was the wilderness, mind you. I didn’t know where I was and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find my way back to get her out.

“Help me,” she said it again, and I couldn’t stop myself from moving closer. It smelled awful, and that made me feel even worse about leaving her down there. All those bones crunching under my body as I brought my eyes closer to the chasm this helpless child dwelled in.

“Hello?”

I said again. I don’t know why I kept repeating myself the same as she. We were like broken record players trying to formulate a sentence without succeeding.

“Help me.”

“Hello?”

“Help me.”

I was close enough to touch my bike when the most terrifying thought of my life lit up like fireworks in my brain.

“How’d you get in there?” I asked.

“Help me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Help me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Help me.” Each time she said it, it was perfect to mimic the previous statement.

This was when I finally confronted the thoughts that were lingering below the surface, the ones I was too afraid to say out loud.

“Say something other than help me.”

“Help me.”

I was too close.

My body told me to run. My skeleton was threatening to evacuate my frame and leave my skin behind.

When she said it once more, I knew that if I put my arm in that hole I’d have been snatched up by whatever was asking to be helped.

“I-I’ll go and get you some help,” I said reluctantly, leaving my bike by that hole and getting to a full stand, hopping on one leg back the way I came.

“Help me.”

I looked back, the bike was still sitting there, perhaps even further away than it had been.

“Help me.”

Her words faded as I walked away.

I reached my house the next day, it was early in the morning. My parents would be gone for the rest of the week.

I called 911 after a nice long sleep after I awoke to an unbearable pain. The ambulance ride was fun. And when the doctors had fixed my leg, I was given a ride back home because we didn’t have anyone to watch over me.

Help me.

I sat on a couch for the rest of the week watching movies with my friends and having trouble sleeping because I couldn’t help but think of that voice.

Help me.

The wilderness.

A place of wild beasts.

The cave.

I know how this sounds, but now that I remember, I know it’s true. The voice that called from the cave belonged to my son. As if this creature knew who I’d care about most during my time on earth. IT had just gotten there quicker than I did.

I couldn’t sleep the night before the drop off. But, I knew that it would kill my son if I told him he wasn’t allowed to stay at his Grampy and LaLa’s. My wife, Renee, felt my tension the closer we got to the destination.

“You okay?” she asked. When she did, I eased my grip on the wheel as we arrived next to that old house.

My father had three four-wheelers set up in the driveway and I'd believed my heart might’ve stopped from the incessant banging against the inside of its bone prison.

There’re 206 bones in the human body.

“Fine,” I replied, wiping the sweat from my brow and looking at my son in the back seat.

When we stopped, he rushed out of the car and I grabbed his things. My father and mother hugged him generously waving at Renee and I as we brought Tyler’s bags to the front step.

“How was the ride up?”

“Fine,” Renee said for the both of us. She knew I was preoccupied. I needed to tell Tyler something before we left.

She went to him first, hugging our son and tearing up a little before reaching our parked car, holding onto her belly as if she had a replacement just in case.

I was last.

My parents watched as I knelt beside him.

“Tyler.”

“Dad.”

“I need you to promise me something.”

“What?” He was puzzled with my earnestness.

“If you hear someone calling for you to help in the woods …” I paused, not wanting to come off as brash.

“Don’t go near the voice, son. Don’t go near that fucking voice.”

I rarely swore around him, and I could tell that my words startled him. But then, when he didn’t say anything, I figured something else was wrong.

“What?” I asked, and he still held that look of befuddlement.

He cleared his throat.

“You mean, like when you hide in my closet at night and call for help?”