Bad Guys Killed My Parents

At least three nights a week, I was a murderer.

When I was six or seven years old, waiting in bed to fall asleep at night, I used to imagine that bad guys wanted to kill my parents.

In this fantasy, my mother and father were bound with ropes – separately, of course, as they’d recently divorced, so they’d have to be rousted and dragged from different homes – and were being forced to the precipice of a fiery pit. The bad guys were looming, hooded men, top heavy with cartoon muscle; they told me that I could choose only one of my parents to live; the other would be tossed then and there into the pit.

This was how I waited for sleep. Picturing malicious bad guys with unknown occult motives menacing my helpless parents; hearing both of them plead with me to pick them to be saved and let the other go. I wanted to choose my mother, naturally, as she was the parent who yelled at me less, and sometimes she knew how to have fun, but then I would see my father standing there, looking so desperately betrayed, and what could I do? I couldn’t let them throw him in the pit! Which left her – should I have them toss her, and throw my lot in with my dad? She would forgive me easier than he would; my father would kill me if I let him get thrown into a fiery pit. On the other hand, I would miss her more.

This was my own terrible secret, that I’d be grateful to be rid of at least one of them. I’d been naughty before, broken rules, even been caught and chewed out, but I’d never felt like a bad person, only an unlucky or unlearned person, who would do better not to get caught the next time in the service of satisfying perfectly reasonable desires. Now, faced with the unshakable awareness that sometimes I wouldn’t mind so much if one – or, heck, both – of my parents were tossed into a fiery pit, I had to admit that I was rotten, evil, incapable and unworthy of love.

By this line of thinking, both parents begging for my rescue (instead of me begging them for my rescue, as was usually the case) should have been the most pleasurable part of the scene for me– both of my parents professing love for me, putting their lives in my hands. One might think that I’d have spent a lot of time relishing their pleas, but I don’t remember any specific phrases. I must have skipped over them. They were pro forma; oddly, they weren’t even very important. Because the minute the dilemma of which parent to doom to a fiery death was presented, the scenario ceased to be about them at all, and became only about me – not their arguments, but my decision, and what kind of moral character in me this test would reveal.

Which we now knew was none. Most nights, I would choose to save my mother, and my father would be tossed into the pit, hollering furiously as he tumbled into the yellow-orange core. Sometimes I flirted with the idea of dooming her instead, but I couldn’t, so they both had to dance at the edge until I got up the guts to give him the old heave-ho. At least three nights a week, I was a murderer, and while technically it wasn’t my doing, my doomed parent never seemed to appreciate that nuance of the situation, focusing instead on what I was doing wrong, as usual.

As I recall, that usually ended the scenario in my head, the gory screams of death, and fade to black. I never heard gratitude from the parent left alive. I was never told why I’d been forced to make this choice. Though I never allowed myself to think it head on, somewhere in my head I’d stashed the notion that all of this was their own fault. The bad guys had taken my parents because my parents needed punishment.

(2015)