Free Shine Your Light on Me by Lee Thompson

front door and heard his mom pleading for something inside the house. Her voice was muffled but desperate. Bobby wanted to go inside, grab a butcher knife from the kitchen, sneak up behind his father and bury it between his shoulder blades.
    But it’d break his mom’s heart, watching that happen, and he doubted she’d understand that he’d done it for her.
    He circled the house, his feet wet and cold. The basement window was ground level, old, the latch rotted. He’d snuck in that way before, but with the rain and snow halfway up the glass he didn’t want to enter the house that way. Yet he couldn’t imagine an easier way to avoid his father, so he knelt there, cleared the snow away with his forearm and pulled his pocket knife and slid it between the sill and popped the latch. The window tilted in on two hinges along the bottom of the frame. The basement was dark. He tweaked the hinges until he could lower the window against the inside wall and slid in feet first.
    Hanging there with half of his body pressed hard against the soaked lawn, feeling his heartbeat accelerate, feeling the relief in his chest as he thought this was the last night his dad would ever be in their lives, in anyone’s life, he dropped to the basement floor with one hand against the damp wall and listened to the noises above.
    It was mostly his mother talking, but his father would interject sometimes.
    She was saying, “You promised me.”
    When he didn’t answer, she said, “Alex, you promised.”
    “I’m done talking about it. Keep pushing me about this and see what happens.”
    Bobby headed over to the steps, his hands stretched out before him until his fingers grazed the rail. He set his weight down gently on each riser. The voices above grew quiet and it seemed to increase the volume of his every movement. When he stopped at the door, he touched the old, unforgiving wood, and then the handle, cold as well, the wind coming in the basement and seeming to have followed him up the steps chilling his wet clothes.
    For a moment, before he opened the door, he was hyperaware of his own physicality.
    This body was a tender one, prone to sickness and injury, riddled with imperfections like his mother’s. It was one of his father’s favorite things to do, point out their imperfections, to contrast them against his own perfections. The slight gap in his mother’s front teeth; Bobby’s small chin; his mother’s veiny, working woman hands; Bobby’s laugh, which no one heard enough, and how it was more cackle than anything; how his mother walked—slowly, stiffly, weakly; how Bobby sometimes, under enormous stress, tended to get tongue-tied and the words got all mixed up between his brain and his mouth; his mother’s choice in clothing and how none of it fit her right when she gained an extra pound; his father’s judgment on Bobby’s frailty, frequently telling him that he looked like a fourteen year old girl; and many, many other opinions about the two of them that his father passed off with a laugh, ridiculing them, poking at them.
    His neck felt overheated. He turned the knob and expected the door to be locked, but it opened soundlessly and he slid through a gap just wide enough for his body, and came out in the laundry room off the kitchen. He had to pull his boots off and set them on the steps because they were soaked. He slid his socks off too, and stripped down to his underwear and piled his clothing on top of his boots and closed the door softly.
    His skin was pale and he looked at his ribs showing through and at his thin legs and knobby knees and lanky arms and felt utterly naked. He knew his father was right, he was sickly looking. Who would want a son or a friend or a boyfriend who looked like that? How could they not look at him minus clothing and break into a fit of laughter?
    His cheeks burned. In the kitchen he grabbed a dish towel and dried himself. The television in the living room was on, broadcasting a show about the death of