“You lying now too,” he muttered.
He stepped closer. I backed up without realizing it until my heel hit gravel and pain spiked through my foot. My knees tensed. My body knew what was coming before my mind allowed the thought to fully form.
“Dad,” I said, and I hate that the word came out like a plea, like the little kid in me still believed he could be reasoned with. “I didn’t—”
The brick came down.
Not a swing from far away. Not a wild motion. He lifted it a few inches and smashed it into my knee with a short, controlled strike, as if he were hammering something in place. The crack was not loud. It was intimate. It happened inside my body. It made my vision go white at the edges.
I didn’t scream at first because my lungs forgot what to do. My breath stuttered like the mechanism had been knocked loose. I dropped, hands hitting the gravel, and pain bloomed so fast it felt like heat flooding my bones.
Then the second hit came. The brick again, on the other knee.
This time I made a sound I didn’t recognize. Not a scream, not words. A guttural thing that came from somewhere older than language.
The world narrowed to gravel and red sunlight and the smell of oil and the taste of metal in my mouth. My knees were wrong. I could feel that immediately. The shape of my legs no longer belonged to me. Something had shifted in a way joints aren’t supposed to shift.
April was still crying, but her crying had changed. It was softer now, not fear but performance winding down. My mother stood with a cup of coffee in her hand like she’d stepped outside to enjoy the weather. She didn’t rush forward. She didn’t gasp. She didn’t call my name.
