Son of Asterius takes place in the Fictional town of Wayanne, where men are either "alcoholics or killers", women are trying to keeps their families from falling apart, and kids are surviving in the arena of life.

I woke up on the floor of my bedroom, face-first, into the old cream carpet. My legs were tangled my old flannel sheets. My hair was stuck to the sides of my face from a cold sweat. It was the kind that left your fingers and toes frozen but your stomach burning with disquiet. I couldn’t hear anything but the dish space heater’s metallic buzz. It sat in the middle of the room, not far from where I laid, with its bright orange face a welcoming round grin. I struggled to breathe with my face against the floor in such a way, but hesitated to move. I felt like I was being watched.

 It couldn’t have been any later than six in the morning, because through the window over my bed the sun was still struggling to get its face over the horizon. After the dish heater turned its head to the right six times, and the left seven, I decided to pull out of the cocoon of sheets I had somehow twisted myself in. Shaking and standing, I grabbed a used towel from the back of the chair sitting in the corner of the room before the mirror. It was still damp from the shower I took the night before.  

It was quiet. Most likely, my mom was still at work in the hospital, and my brother was asleep.  The heater’s buzz followed me into the hallway of my house. It wasn’t big. None of the houses in Wayanne were. They’re built to feign comfort and cozy, but really were cramped and improperly constructed. The hallway was only wide enough for me to lift my elbows out and straight.

Getting the bathroom door to open took almost all my strength. It was probably because I was still trembling. I used my shoulder to push through the frame. Like our house, our bathroom was undersized. A shower, no tub, an old porcelain toilet from the eighties (it was blue), and a sink with curling dolphins as the handles. Some of the water from last night’s shower was still clinging to the shower door’s frosted glass.

It was freezing. In the winter, the high desert dropped to the thirties some nights. I could practically feel the frost coming through the tiles. Only hot showers could bring the feeling back to my feet.  It took fifteen minutes for it to get that hot, but the tingle of the cold ebbing away was always worth it. As the water ran, I sat on the toilet, tracing the moles on my forearm.

People always made comments about them. I was covered in beauty marks. On a girl, they said, it’s beautiful, highlighting the delicacy of the female form. On a boy, it was emasculating.  One that sat on the side of my mouth my mom had always mistook for a crumb of food. When we were younger, my brother would trace drawings with the ones on my back. I remembered a specific blue doodle that was supposed to be a dog that looked more like a dragon. There was a polaroid of it somewhere on the fridge, hidden under piles of takeout menus and brochures.

For a long time it was only me, my brother, and my mom. It had been so for at least eleven years. Before that we had lived in Kings Hill, with Wyatt Black, my dad. I don’t remember much about him. In fact, my clearest memory of his face was the look he made when I was called to the stand in Phoenix. Grey eyes burning into mine as the prosecutor asked me the questions we went over that morning over breakfast.

He was the kind of man that you only read about and fear to meet. A Taurus born in the year of the ox standing at around 6’5”, whose color of choice was red, who had a tattoo of a pair of bullhorns across his shoulder blades, and whose favorite kind of food was a horsemeat burger. I was going to make a Last Unicorn joke, but it would be unnecessary. He also happened to be a volunteer fireman. Every week he spent a night or two kicking down the burning doors of meth houses to save a sorry man’s ass. Whether they wanted to or not, they were coming with him back through the hot labyrinth into the clear night air.

In King’s Hill, he was notorious for being the man that had a loaded rifle slung across his back like a samurai, going anywhere from the bank to the bar. No one said a thing about it because they were terrified of him. In some way, out of that fear came respect.

Which is why I was the only witness, straining against the fist of his gaze to keep from breaking down. I remember clutching the edge of my seat with my left hand as they made me swear on the Bible with my right.

You see, Wyatt had a terrible drinking problem. Thursday nights, a working man’s Friday, would be when you would find him at the local sport bar, ordering himself pint after pint. He wasn’t a sloppy drunk, but was stubborn enough to get into his truck and attempt to drive home. Anyone that tried to stop Wyatt got the barrel of his rifle up his nose until he got the sense to mind his business. He was every bartender’s nightmare.

Of course, not everyone had the same sense to stay out of his way. Robert Thomas and Wyatt had quarrels in the past that didn’t really amount to much. On a warm night they gathered on the porch to talk out their differences, and it didn’t end well. Wyatt Black shot a Robert Thomas for pouring a beer in his lap. Swung that rifle into his left hand and pulled the trigger without thinking. I wasn’t the only one there. Four other men were drinking on our porch that night.

Robert lived, but was paralyzed from the waist down and had to piss in a bag for the rest of his life. He didn’t even want to press charges, but the DA insisted. I was the thing that landed him in jail for up to 15 years with little chance of probation. However there was word. In fact, a mouthful of words said by my uncle over the phone.

“Wyatt’s out. I suggest you tell Teresa and get the fuck out of Wayanne.”

Hopefully, you can understand my paranoia. I was Wyatt’s pride and joy. I was the first born son in the year of the Dog, a Virgo born in September, and uncomfortable in big crowds, but pretty good with a baseball bat. He loved me in his own way. He had his own way with everything, I guess.

The shower was steaming now, and it filled the bathroom with a hot and humid fog. My fingers were cold and stiff. I was eager to get in the warmth.

“I dreamt about the Minotaur again,” I said as I traced a scar across Walter’s arm.

We were in his bedroom, lying next to each other. He was on his back staring at the ceiling while I lay on my side, admiring the smooth healed-over skin. Walter and I were in love. So much in love we didn’t need to spend our hours together making out like my other friends with their girlfriends. It was the kind that left us content with each other’s company. I would tell him about my nightmares, and he would then retell me his dreams.

Walter lived with his aunt in the center of town in a small sky blue house with white roof shingles. She was gone most days, which left us alone most of the time.

Everything about Walter was blue. His room, his thick framed glasses, his eyes, his shirts and jeans, his underwear, even his tongue was sometimes dyed indigo from raspberry drinks.

He looked at me with some concern from under the hood of his red hair. “What happened?”

“Got to my mom first. Then Bobby. He killed me next. Made sure it was extra painful,” I said while wrapping my arms around Walter’s torso. “Came straight at me out of the blood red ocean. His breath steamed away the tides and left salt. Pinned me to the ground with his horns and then gutted me with his hands.” Sounds from the nightmare were coming back. The heavy breathing, the seagulls burning to crisps when they flew too close. I buried my face in Walter’s sweater to fight back the tears.

“Sounds terrible,” Walter replied. He looked down at me, and I gazed back. I was tempted to close the inches between our lips. We had never kissed. Sometimes I saw it in his eyes that he wanted to.

Walter was not only fresh minty type of gorgeous, but he was so smart. He wanted to be an engineer. I don’t even know what engineers do, but it wasn’t a basketball star. He aspired to go to some university on the east coast, away from the sinkhole that was Wayanne. I was going to drown in it happy with the thought that he would get out before I did. I took in the smell of his clothes, so fresh and clean. Like lavender and cucumbers. In his room I felt so safe. “I’m so tired. I sleep all day and I’m still so tired. I don’t know what to do.”

“You need to go to the doctor,” he said. Walter squirmed out of my arms and off the bed. He went over to a pair of jeans lying on the floor. “Here, I got this for you.”

Out of the back pocket came a small white card with gold lettering. I scrunched my face to read it as he gave it to me. A psychiatrist’s name with an address not too far. On the back there was a list of things he specialized in: post-natal depression, PTSD, and a host of other things I didn’t recognize.

“Walter, what is this? I don’t need a shrink to tell me about my problems.”

“That’s not all they do. They also help you move past traumatic experiences. Admit it or not putting your own dad in jail is pretty traumatic.” He sat down next to me, putting two slender and warm hands on my face. Sitting next to each other a difference in height was exaggerated. I felt like I was looking straight down.  “Hearing the things you think about, how stressed you are, how you can’t sleep because you’re afraid of your own subconscious—the showers, Logan! How many showers did you take last night?”

I pushed away his hands and straightened out my shirt, which had gone askew. “You don’t need to know that.”

“How many?”

I didn’t say anything. From the look on his face it seemed he had gotten his answer. There was a small glint of vindication in his eyes. I shot up from the bed, scanning the room for where I had left my things. “I’m leaving.”

My sewed over again charcoal bookbag was slumped against the door frame, already spilling into the hallway. My mother’s old jacket had been tossed into a corner. I went to pick it up and Walter stammered.

“Don’t, stop, wait—”

“I’ve taken enough of this for today.” I was already halfway through his ever-blue little home. His aunt had it decorated like a beach house with a hammock in the living room next to the sofa in front of a fireplace decorated in palm trees. The front door’s curvy silver handle shone from across the living room as I made my way towards it. I grabbed it and tore it open wide.

Walter turned me around. My balance was thrown and he knew it. Took hold of my shoulders with those chess club hands and smashed his lips against mine. I froze as if I had been caught red-handed. His slipped his hand down the back of my jeans and I felt his soft hands grasp my ass and I felt a flood of warm and nervousness move in me. Walter’s smell flooded my nose, the smell of Listerine, so clean, and the woven fabric of his sweater against my fingers. He took a single step backwards.

I stood on his porch, which opened to a wide street called Mulberry. Each way down there was house after house until you hit a main street, and that would break into old strip malls and sports bars. It was an early December afternoon and no one was out but the mailman. He was in the middle of stuffing an old woman’s mailbox full of past due notices when he stopped to look at us over Walter’s white gravel yard. Our eyes met, and he quickly turned back to the mailbox. Walter pulled me inside, and hugged me tight around the chest with his glasses digging into my collarbone.

“If you really care about me, you’ll go.”

Since last year, I had begun to have horrific visions. There was I, usually trapped in an inescapable place, an island, a labyrinth, my bedroom, or a jail cell. It was always him. The Minotaur. He wouldn’t be there completely at first. He’d appear like a heartbeat. A small ball of something the size of my fist that with every beat he’d grow or morph. Out of the sea foam he would swell and smash upon the beach. From a grave’s soil he’d become the mountainous smelly remnants of the long dead. He’d grow, infect, and then tower. Standing at ten feet tall, his sinewy male torso would inflate with every hungry breath. His hooves would grind into the ground so deep it would make the earth bleed. His fur was blacker than the void and eyes red as Betelgeuse which were just as massive. Gigantic spiraling horns curving out and up, so sharp they could saw through bone with ease. The Minotaur would torture me, split me open, eat my insides. Usually that’s when I wake up.

Sometimes they became so bad I would go a couple days without sleeping just to avoid them. However, after a while that didn’t get much better. I remember once I was trying to take a piss in the bathroom after not sleeping for three days. It was the late afternoon, no one was really around and I was the only one practicing my batting. Two hours, ball after ball until the basket was out, going around picking them up and doing it all over again. There I was, standing at the urinals counting the mold colonies between the tiles when I felt this hot dribble down my back. Then there was the god-awful stench of sulfur and burning breath against my neck.

I hallucinated the Minotaur. That wasn’t the last time either. It started happening when I was at school, in class, in the locker rooms, on the toilet. I’d always feel him near. There would be the sound of hooves or the stench of his hide.

 I’m not crazy.

I left Walter’s house and walked back to school. We were still practicing over winter break. I had to be at the field usually at two, but I took my time.

Wayanne was the kind of town where men buried guns in their backyard to dig up in case of a burglary. The men, when not at work, spent their days sitting on each others’ fences spitting tobacco. If not that, they were in prison. The women were at coffee shops in their book club meetings talking about Ayn Rand and Atlas shrugging off the world’s weight. They had tight-lipped smiles for their acquaintances and forked tongued rumors for their enemies.

People my age were caught sitting around fires in the desert, drinking Jim Beam and roasting marshmallows for s’mores. December in Wayanne was always the worst. It was the time of year, when there was less sun, that people would start dying. Walter had lost his uncle last year on Christmas Eve and our landlord had a stroke two days before that in her shower. No one found her for three days and the water was still running. It flooded the bathroom and her bedroom, where it turned to ice because she refused to use the heater in her own home.

People in Wayanne were rough around the edges. The desert did that to people. Withered away by the hot, dry winds of the summer and bittered by the cold winters.

I could see it happening to my mom. We were forest folk, from the red rocks where lush trees grew on whatever surface had soil. After five years in Wayanne, lines formed on her face like ocean trenches along her cheekbones and forehead. She looked like a mesa. When we were kids her luscious black hair would be flowing around her face like ribbons, but now it was brittle, grey, and falling out. Bobby was young enough when we moved here that he looks no different from any other Wayanne kid. Dirty, coarse, mulish, and hard. With his buzzcut and braces, scabs and scars from scuffles in the desert. Sometimes when I looked at him, I thought I was looking at a hungry coyote.

Wayanne’s only high school was made up of around three hundred students.  It was basically like a large extended family. Everyone knew everyone else, everyone fucked everyone else, and there were no shortage of rivalries or wars. Occasionally, there were the kids that Bobby hung around beating on some poor little fool. I sometimes would get involved just to break it up, but most days I was too tired to.

I headed to the gym at the back of the school, which was up against another edge of town. There was one street, a couple houses, and then the rugged scrubland for miles and miles. I could see the railroad from the edge of the schoolyard. It cut straight across the Wayanne like a knife. In the summer you could see the heat coming up from the rails in waves, distorting your vision. In December though, a train rarely came by. Maybe it was because the tracks would ice over? Maybe it was because no one wanted anything to do with Wayanne when it was cold and empty.

It was almost four now, and the baseball field was empty except for a couple of gloves and bats scattered around. I went into Coach Booker’s office that was a little building off the west side of the school yard. Booker was a man in his fifties, scratchy and rough. He was tall and thin with bristly white hair and a beard to match. He had a kind of John Wayne look about him; he was what I considered to be the modern cowboy: a man stuck between two eras. He had the habit of wearing an old varsity jacket. He leaned back in his office chair with his feet up, showing off his red snakeskin boots, watching some movie on an old VHS.

He didn’t bother to look at me, and continued to shine a small silver pistol. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Nowhere,” I replied quietly as I closed the office door behind me.

“Nowhere indeed. You think you’re too good to practice?”

I shook my head in silence, shifting from foot to foot.

Booker motioned me to sit down in a small, rickety wooden chair in front of his desk. It was inclined slightly so that he towered over whomever’s ass possessed that seat. The television buzzed behind us, the sound of the VHS pulling on tapes accompanied with a small hum. Booker’s black eyebrows knitted together and hooded his eyes from sight. He cleared his throat, and placed the pistol on his desk.

“Look, I know all about the queer shit you do with Victoria’s nephew,” he began.  

I tensed, fingers digging into my jeans as the intensity of his stare increased. I couldn’t breathe, and suddenly, my skin was on itching all over. The cold feeling was beginning to creep up my fingers and toes—I was freezing.  

“You know one of the teachers caught you two in a janitor’s closet two weeks ago, shit, Logan. If you were my son…” He noticed my discomfort and for some reason decided to change the subject. “I… hear your father’s out of jail.”

“Yessir,” I 

said in a small voice. I straightened out my jacket, it felt amiss. The numbness began to subside, but still loomed on the edge of my nerves.

“I hear he’s out to find you all.”

I nod once. “I hear that, too.”

“Hear from my brother out on King’s Hill he’s headed this way.” Coach Booker looked at me straight. “You ever shot a gun, Logan?”

“My mom doesn’t believe in guns.” The sight of a man with a gun on his hip made my mom jump into hysterics. She would pull me as far away as possible, muttering about dangerous habits.

Booker’s eyes were grey like rain clouds, deep and bursting. He could say things with them that scholars wish they could put in an encyclopedia. It felt like they tore me open with a wrinkled hand and traced my life through my veiny insides. After the pause, Booker flipped the pistol in his hand, giving it to me handle first. “Well, it’s about time she starts reconsidering.”

I didn’t move. “He can’t find us. We got different names now.”

The coach raised an eyebrow as if to ask if I were serious. “It’s easy to forget a name, Logan. It ain’t easy to forget a face. Wayanne is a long way from King’s Hill, but it ain’t hard to find.” He was still waiting for me to take the gun. The silver gleamed in the fluorescent light.