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Mickey knows just how likely he was to become a statistic.
He’s five years old, lying in a bloody heap of small boy and crimson on the floor. He doesn’t remember what he’d done to deserve this beating, but he knows it was justified. He knows this is the only way he learns, from the dull agony of a fully developed fist against his small, malnourished body.
He’s five years old, sitting in front of the gun on the coffee table. The black material glistening in the sunlight streaming in. It’s hot, he remembers, mid-summer and scorching. Terry hadn’t gotten the money, or the care, to pay the air conditioning bills, leaving his children to bake in their own home. Two bullets lay beside the weapon, calling out to him in inaudible whispers that beg to pull him closer. Mickey knows exactly how to load it, it would be so easy to just steal them and hide away in his room.
It would be so easy to just go the pussy way out. But he knew he shouldn’t, couldn’t, he had a duty. Protect Mandy. Get her out of this shithole. After that, he knows he can.
He’d accepted long ago that he was a pussy, the exact thing his father tried to beat out of him time and time again.
He’s eight years old, home alone with Mandy off in some other adjacent room. Brothers and father gone, out on a drug run, hopefully to bring enough money back for groceries. He gave the last handful of cheap, off brand cereal to his sister hours ago. Mickey knows where one of the many guns in the house is located, he’d learned their positions with Terry’s insistence. Saying that it was for safety, to protect Mandy.
He knows she’s going to come down soon enough and whine for more, tell him how her stomach is aching despite the small attempt at a meal inside her. How’d he have to tell her to wait, go take a nap. You can’t be hungry if you’re asleep, that’s what Iggy taught him. Iggy’s never wrong.
He’s twelve years old, kicked out of the house because he didn’t rake in enough cash for his father’s endless demands. It’s late December, Christmas day if memory serves him correctly. Instead of the happiest day of the year for him, it’s one of the worst. The biting cold eats at his appendages, digging into his fingers, toes, and nose. He’s sure he’s suffering from some form of frostbite. Maybe he’ll freeze to death. Maybe he’ll get trapped beneath a snow bank, suffocated. Maybemaybemaybemaybemaybe-
Mickey remembers hiding underneath an overpass from the snow, blowing air onto his hands; the motion doing little to nothing to aid in warming himself up. His clothes are wet, usually baggy but now they’re sticking to his flesh and keeping in the bone deep chill.