Tragedy ✔️

Chapter Thirty Seven

I laugh, shaking my head. “Definitely not dying.” I tell him. “But on a more serious note… Beck, you’re not yourself lately. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He says, his smile faltering. His lips were now set into a firm line.

“I found a notebook under your bed, Beck… There are poems written inside of it. Care to tell me what they mean?”

I didn’t want to think of the poems as something to be serious, but something in the way they’re written made me feel more on guard. There was something wrong with Beck.

His features changed so damn fast.

He looked uncomfortable to say the least.

I frown, knowing that the poems meant something more than just being poems.

I knew they meant something more.

“They’re just poems for school, River.” He finally says.

It wasn’t just poems, it was the fucking aftermath of what my abusive drunk of a father did to them when I wasn’t there to protect them. There, written in black on the white page, was the evidence of what my dad did to my mom and Beck.

I knew it was a bad idea to come here.

I knew being here would reopen more wounds…wounds I forgot I had.

I had to bite my tongue when the guard stopped in front of a closed off cell with nothing but a small peek-through window, and a door handle. When he opens the door, I smell the cologne I absolutely despised with everything inside me.

My dad’s cologne.

Even in the prison cell wherein my father rotted for months didn’t rid him from his cologne. I smelled it through the stale air that smelled like cheap tobacco, bad plumbing and a hint of urine coming from the steel toilet in the corner of the room. If those smells didn’t rid my nostrils from his cologne, nothing will.

I don’t think I can forget the smell of his cologne anyways.

It always lingered in the air; even after all this time.

The cologne was so strong that it burned the back of my throat when I inhaled.

“Ten minutes.” The guard reminds me. “There are cameras inside his room. If I see your hands underneath the table, I will cut your little visitation shorter.”

“Nothing would make me happier.” I tell him, sidestepping past him and into my father’s cell.

The guard closes the door behind me and I look right—to the corner of the wall—and there it was: the camera the guard kept mentioning. At least I knew that there was someone watching us, in case my dear old dad tried to do something.

The room was small, quite isolated. There was a small barred window straight ahead, a single bed with a thin white sheet draped over it, a small wooden end table beside the bed and a toilet and a sink to wash your hands, and the table the guard mentioned right in the middle of the room and a wooden chair behind it.

The guard didn’t know that I wasn’t going to move to sit at the table. I was going to stand by the door the entire ten minutes I have to be inside this room, hoping that the ten minutes would pass by fast so that I could leave here as fast as I came.