“Is everything ready?” I asked, fixing the watch on my wrist.
He muted the call and said, “Wyatt is being a little difficult.”
“Of course, he is,” I said, taking the phone from him and listening to Wyatt as he snapped over the line saying;
“Don’t you know it’s usually the messengers that die first? That’s where the saying ‘don’t shoot the messenger,’ comes from…the fact that they were often shot!”
SIX
“Just like our eyes, our hearts have
a way of adjusting to the dark.”
~ Adam Stanley
WYATT
Metathesiophobia.
The fear of change.
There are many different names for the phobia of new things but Metathesiophobia was specifically about the ability to control one’s environment and unwillingness to move, to progress or to change anything from routine. Children who moved a lot or parents who had lost their children often are diagnosed with this phobia, making them unable to change their kids’ rooms after they died.
I was now beyond certain… No-one in my fucking family feared changing shit!
“I’m going to kill them,” I muttered to myself, ripping the last goddamn cat poster from my wall and shoving it into the empty box before opening the door and throwing it out into the motherfucking bloody hall! “FUCK ALL OF YOU!” I yelled before slamming the door. I didn’t give a shit if they were sleeping! If I couldn’t fuckin’ sleep, they shouldn’t fuckin’ sleep!
“Bunch of cunts…” I muttered, looking around my room, finally able to relax…when I saw it….one last item of cat paraphernalia - a pair of slippers by the dresser.
I balled my fist, trying to stay calm.
But I was at my limit.
Let us replay the last twelve hours, I thought. I had been in Boston, saving my shitty, stick-up-the-ass, know-it-all elder brother from bleeding out on the floor of what looked like a 1980s-porno set before going out and getting revenge on the man who had left him to bleed out on said porno set… Only to find out my fucking asshole of brother allowed himself and his wife to nearly die just to bring me back to Chicago… Where I had a gun pointed in my face by a rat-faced bastard who had the nerve to get his blood on my favorite pair of pure alligator-skin House of Testoni shoes after my twin sister shot
him through the skull.
All of that I could take.
In fact, for my family…that was pretty much a normal Thursday.
Which is why I decided to rest. Simply go to my room, close my eyes, and mentally prepare myself for the long years of normal Callahan days that were to come now that I was back… I should have known. Why I let my guard down for even a second was beyond me… Everyone thought Ethan was nothing but a serious, cold, glaring, murdering, manipulating genius…he was…but above all that, he was my older brother. And like all older brother’s, he missed no opportunity to fuck me with me.
Which is why when I walked into my room… Instead of seeing my room exactly as I’d left it, I walked into a fucking cat-lady’s paradise.
Cat bedsheets.
Cat pillows.
Cat rug.
Cat bathmats.
And fucking…cat slippers!
Why?
Why?