ver fontem {d1} fin

You weren’t always this way: drunk as a dog while your fingers shakily tried to grasp the cap of another bottle. Some nights you could think clearly minus the influence of substance but those were the times you dreaded the most (and you still believed the drinks and drugs would do some good for you, didn’t you?). If you didn’t cloud your mind then it would begin to dredge up things you were quite certain you wanted to forget. It was mainly a voice nagging and taunting in the back of your mind like an ever-present parental figure. That voice didn’t just arise from nothing – no, certainly not. The voice had a particular shrill tone to it, one that caught your attention even though the person it belonged to was long gone from your life.

Much to your parent’s dismay – more so your mother’s – you didn’t match their image of a perfect Career at birth. They didn’t think that way until the doctor took a rather long time with their newborn child, mulling over nothing obvious. You were wailing just as every other infant so you weren’t suffocating, but what was it? He turned around with a mild expression on his face and handed you over to your curious mother. ”He’s got a cataract-like film covering his right eye and is therefore fully blind in that eye. It shouldn’t spread to the other eye until he’s much older, though, so don’t worry. The only trouble he might have is just with his depth perception in unfamiliar places and running into things on his right side.” It’s nothing short of a miracle that you don’t remember the way your mother looked down at you all curled up in her arms; it was an absolute livid look, like she had already labeled you as a lost cause. While your father certainly didn’t have a smile on his face he was much more lenient than your mother: he still viewed you as his one and only son, and so he held you much closer to himself than your mother did (she had refuses already to even breastfeed you). He sheltered you from much of her scorn at home and took care of you, being the only one to sneak you a treat or two during your birthdays when you were locked up in your room with only pitiful explanations for your detainment.

From a very early start your mother refused to even so much as help you cope with your blind eye. If you ran into a wall and split the skin on your forehead she turned the other way, mumbling something about how you should “know better” and not be “incompetent.” You couldn’t be a Career even if you wanted to because all you did was fumble around and run into things. Desperation got the better of her, though. She begged and pleaded with very few people (all while upholding her pristine social image, of course) trying to find a solution that would somehow restore sight to your bad eye. One such answer that turned up was a solution mixture which she hastily brewed and put in a dropper, telling you that it would make you “normal.” The idea of being like everyone else was so captivating that you willingly allowed her to drop the liquid into your eye as she continuously proclaimed that she could see the blue iris underneath the film already starting to show up. Your hopes began to rise but then your eye started to burn intensely. For a young toddler such as yourself the pain was unbearable. You shrieked and she slapped a hand over your mouth, saying more sternly that the solution was working (a false reassurance for herself more than you) and poured more in, adding onto the awful sensation. You only screamed harder against her hand, tears streaming from your eyes and trying to flush out the awful burning liquid. She spat in your face and dubbed you ignorant for not recognizing the “duty” she was servicing you, and in a fit of frustration (over you or the failed experiment?) threw you away to your room and locked the door. Your father, having watched terrified from the sidelines, crept to your door with a small cup of water, cradling you in his arms. He coaxed you into allowing him to pour the lukewarm water into your eye to clean it out and afterward you clung to him and cried into his shirt. His plan to distract you from the pain was to introduce you to a checkered board and pawns and knights and queens – he tried to teach you the rules of chess but all you could focus on was having the knights rescue the pawns from the evil queens and rooks. Your father played along with a tired smile until you fell sound asleep, and he tucked you into bed.

School seemed like an odd sanctuary for you. Of course you had your witch of a mother to deal with before you left – ”Don’t you dare look anyone in the eye, Ver Fontem.” – but as soon as your father took your hand and led you off down the road everything was alright for once. There was no escaping other students looking at you strangely and it made you feel terribly self-conscious so you kept your gaze down, but the onlookers quickly got over your oddity and started to ask you questions and get to know you. You kept your answers short and offered forced and little smiles, just as you had been instructed, and gradually you opened up. You laughed, you grinned, and people even helped you when you ran into corners. You showed an eagerness to learn and you often volunteered in class to read aloud or answer questions. You held no fear of answering something wrong because you realized that that was the whole process of learning: trial and error. The majority of answers you presented for the teacher were wrong anyway but the desire to learn was so intense that even the little red X’s littering your test papers didn’t bother you. You showed the papers with low grades to your father and told him, ”Look what all I get to learn! I got them wrong, but I’m learning!”, and he would smile, ruffle your dirty blonde hair, and say how proud he was of your enthusiasm.

When your mother got a hold of your test papers she ripped them up in front of you. You frowned deeply, tears welling in your eyes, subjecting yourself to another one of her attempts to “fix” your eye because she firmly believed the root of your academic failure rested in your eye. She pinned you down and brought out a knife – instantly you panicked. She growled something about erasing the problem completely and dipped the blade toward your eye but you moved your head and received a long cut along your cheek. Shrieks of terror escaped you and your mother scowled, yelling for you to keep still as she tried again, missing a second time and cutting up through your dark, thick eyebrow to your forehead. You could hear your father begging and pleading with his wife from behind but she never acknowledged him, cutting your face up until he literally pulled her off of you. You wasted no time in scrambling across the floor and darting to your room, willingly locking yourself in and burying yourself in a nest of blankets under your bed, clutching the checkered board and pieces tightly.

Over time the gashes healed into nasty-looking scars scattered all around your right eye and you told the people at school you had gotten into a fight with a cat. They didn’t seem to believe it but they quietly let it slide, choosing to simply ignore the scars and carry on as usual. Your enthusiasm had been dwindling significantly and your teachers took notice, asking if there was anything wrong. Once again you forced a small smile and told her that everything was fine and that you were just tired, particularly since your “cat suddenly turned on you and hasn’t shown any sign of improving his temperament.” She bought into it (although you were certain she’d seen through the fabricated lie), offering some advice to offer the feline a can of tuna as a bribe before sending you on your way home.

Because your mother forbade you from stepping foot into the training center you found another way to occupy our afternoons in an attempt to lessen the amount of time spent at home: music club. You heard them playing afterschool one day and so you crept to the door and listened, peering through the crack by the frame. They were students no older than you, playing instruments ranging from the piccolo to the tuba, creating such lovely sounds out of nothing. You never actually joined them, however; you always just watched through the door or sat out under the open window and listened, absolutely mesmerized by the songs the group of students produced. You found yourself nodding along to the tempo, trying to hum and match the pitches, and slowly but surely you began to tap out rhythms in the dirt or on the floor. You watched the drummer in particular and how they handled so many flat surfaces, hitting on them with nothing more than sticks with bulbs on the end and creating an endless rhythm. When you returned home you would gather boxes and avoid your mother, taking them up to your room and stacking them in such a way that you believed resembled the drum set back in the classroom. You smiled – one of the very few times you ever smiled within the walls of that house. Using pencils you beat the boxes and tubs, producing very rudimentary songs that filled you with absolutely pure joy. You held the makeshift drum sticks in the way your saw the drummer hold them: with a light grip and giving the stick enough room to move without constraint. You lost yourself in the cadences and grinned ear-to-ear, pounding your worries away on the cardboard and plastic surfaces, letting loose for the first time in your life.

Of course, the noise was loud. Your mother came storming up to your room and tore down the boxes and tubs, broke the pencils, and screamed in your face about how defected Careers shouldn’t be able to create things. She brought you to tears and as soon as she left you broke down, crawling under your bed and sobbing into the blanket you kept there. For the first time in your life you had been proud of what you did. This wasn’t anything like a test score or question you raised your hand to answer – this was absolute magic, something you created with your very own two hands. It was purely and solely yours.

You didn’t let her stop you.

Eventually you gained your courage back and you began to tap rhythms into the floorboards with a pair of drum sticks (stolen from the music class, unfortunately) sans any boxes or tubs. You let your spirit flow until it was extinguished by your mother barging in again and asking you to hold out your hands to stomp on them. Despite the pain you also gained the foundation for a stable – but odd – sense of courage. You waited and played chess in the meantime before trying again and again to use your creative outlet of drumming, frequently getting your hands stomped on. You certainly did test your mother’s patience and you should’ve known better but you were getting cocky; the courage you had built up over the weeks suddenly disappeared when your mother appeared in the doorway with a hammer and two long nails. She asked you to lay your hands out, just as she always did, and you swallowed hard against the lump in your throat as she set the tip of the nail on the back of your hand and slammed the hammer down. The woman paid no attention to your screams as she nailed both your hands to the floorboards without even so much as a second thought; she then stood, muttered under her breath, and left.

You lay whimpering on the floor, face drained of all color, tears continuously streaming down your cheeks. Through the walls you could hear your parents arguing and swearing at each other, and honestly you were frightened for your father. Your mother was a terrifying woman and was capable of many sadistic things, so what could she do to him? You wanted to help him but even the slightest tug on your hands would send a tremendous shock of white-hot pain surging through your arms and brought a fresh wave of tears to your eyes. So you stayed put, weeping quietly, listening to the muffled fight taking place in another room.

There was a break in the yelling and then the sound of splintering glass filled the silence. Then rushed footsteps. Your head snapped around when you heard your door bust open to reveal your panicked father, a great gash stretching across his chest and blood turning his shirt black. You had no time to react – he came running over, spilling hurried words that made no sense to you. Run? Get out? But why? There was no doubt in your mind that he meant what he was saying, you just couldn’t understand why he was so desperate for you to leave until you saw your mother standing in the doorway behind him.

She held a long knife in her hand and the edge was slick with blood. Fear struck you to your very core and you stared, wide-eyed. Your father took note of it and whirled around, already begging and pleading for her to calm down, asking for some sort of compromise. The fire in her eyes was absolutely evident and you had never been so sure of anything else in your short life. She lurched forward with an outstretched arm, striking your father at the base of his neck. Blood spurted out like some sort of sick fountain and in a matter of seconds you could hear him struggling and gasping to breathe, collapsing to his knees. You let out a terrified yelp, tugging against the nails but only hurting yourself further and the pain leaving you even more vulnerable. She set her hand atop your father’s head and cast him aside like a towel. He laid still aside from a heaving chest, and the blackish blood just poured down his neck and you yelled for him. ”Dad—Daddy! Please, please—“

Your head turned up and you saw your mother hovering over you, wielding the knife and still holding the demented look in her eyes. Despite the pain you knew it caused you began to frantically yank back against the nails away from her as she took a fistful of your hair, pulling you back to her. You whimpered, trying to plead with her to let you go, bargaining whatever you could think of in order to gain your freedom, but it was frustratingly futile. Instead she drew the knife closer to your face and you knew she was heading straight for your eye – you jerked your head back but she held your hair tightly and therefore kept your head in place, the knife tip digging into your cheek just below your eye. Needless to say you entered full-on panic mode: you yanked, you pulled, and you hauled yourself back as much as you possibly could to get away from that knife. The sudden movements caused her to readjust the blade placement and she ended up poking it rather hard into your cheek until you felt the cold steel scrape against your teeth; that alone was enough to spur you into an adrenaline rush. You wrenched backwards and the nail ripped through the flesh between your left ring and middle finger, and without even a second thought you grabbed the fingers on your right hand and, using both arms, you tore the right hand up, bringing the nail with it. While your mother was distracted by your brutish attempt to escape you did just as she did to your father and shoved her to the side, snagged your drum sticks, bolted for the door and charged down the stairs, blinded by your own tears.

You ran. And ran. And ran. Along the way you ran into quite a few people but you didn’t stop to answer their questions about why you were bleeding. You held your hands and drum sticks close to your chest and ducked your head away from everyone before turning into an alley and collapsing into a hyperventilating heap behind a dumpster. You were thirteen at the time – such a young thing and naïve to the world that surrounded you.

”Don’t you dare look anyone in the eye, Ver Fontem.”

As the days went on you were yearning desperately for some sort of escape from the pain of both your injuries and hunger and you found it in the form of drugs. You didn’t know what kind of drug it was the man gave you, but Ripred did it feel good. The pain slowly slipped away and you laid in the back of the alley with a dimwitted grin on your face, using the shield of your dulled senses in order to pry the nail out of your right hand and sticking it in your pocket. The nail wounds took an awful long time to heal and you were fairly certain the right one had become infected so you treated it as best you could and you were damn lucky being able to keep it and not having it rot off. The gashes on your face healed up, too, only adding to the obvious and puffy scars that littered the right side of your face.

Your dealer smirked every time you went crawling to him, asking for another dose of drugs to get you through the week. Since you were still so young he gave you a few very small doses for free (more than likely to just get you addicted) but he quickly began to ask for money, and so you had to think up a way to get a small amount of money to pay for more. He gave you a small packet to tide you over, though, and told you that if you didn’t bring him some money he would cut off your supply. A strange desperation set in and you racked your brain for ideas, turning up none until you remembered you had a pair of old drum sticks in your back pocket.

You went around to the local bars and asked if they needed a drummer or some form of nightly entertainment. Most of the owners laughed and turned you away due to your age, but one man hesitated. He asked you to try out the dusty drum set in the corner and you happily obliged, feeling that same sense of freedom you felt back in your room as you struck the snares and base and cymbals, ignoring the flares of pain in your awfully bandaged hands. The owner smiled and said he’d strike you a deal: you played for him on some nights but the only money you would receive would be from tips (“so you better play damn good, kid.”) You smiled and shook his hand, and that night you were up on the stage, drumming out an improvised rhythm accompanied by a stranger with a guitar that the drunkards would bob their head to.

At first the tips you received were only enough to get you a tiny dose of drugs but steadily the amount grew, as did your curiosity to try a drink or two of alcohol. The drunks were always laughing whenever they weren’t trying to sluggishly brawl one another and so one night, after getting about ten dollars in tips, you slipped over to the bar and quietly snagged a dark brown bottle off the counter.

The initial sip was entirely too bitter and you scrunched up your face, spitting the liquid out. It was enticing, though; you took a few more sips and before you knew it the bottle had been drained. It made your extremities tingle in a way that caused a giggle to arise and you felt the need to snag another bottle so you did, gulping it down in a greedy manner, and then a third, guzzling it without hesitation.

The night was nothing but a blacked out blur and you acquired a thumping headache in the morning, vomiting in the back alley you called home but you deemed everything was worth it. You had successfully found a substitute for drugs when money was running dry or, hell, whenever you felt like blacking out for a while. Drugs make things bearable, alcohol makes you forget.

And so you spent five years alternating between getting high and drunk, collapsing in the back alley every night when all the drunkards were stumbling home. You never once minded living out on the street – no one bothered you, no one asked about your eye or scars, no one scolded you for nonsensical things. Every day you drowned out your mother’s awful, scratchy voice with either an injection or a large swig of whiskey, and eventually you came to the realization that you were never sober or off drugs for more than a day. You never minded it, though. The drugs and drinks became as close to you as that beat-up pair of drum sticks you carried everywhere in your back pocket, along with that rusting nail that held a permanent residence in your side pocket. Your clothes became as holey as the inside of your elbow and you hadn’t owned a pair of shoes in five years after you outgrew your old ones.

Nothing bothered you, no one bothered you. You were just as free as each of the cadences you created every night in the bar, nothing tethering you down to the physical world. You gradually gained back your courage and travelled around One during the daytime (being sure to not run into anything on your right side, of course) and your sense of adventure sparked with each new discovery you made – it was everything your mother had told you not to go out and experience for the petty fear of somehow shaming the Fontem name by showing your face.

Ender found you passed out in the alley. He said he had seen you performing in the bar and then trailed behind you as you stumbled out the back door to just collapse onto the floor. You grinned, chuckling and rubbing your temples. A few more words were exchanged and soon he told you about his house and how the majority of rooms were empty, save a few them occupied by his good friends, and then he offered you one. It took a while for it to process in your sluggish, foggy mind what he was saying and then you stared at him in disbelief. He was offering you a place to call home and a roof over your head, and it was certainly better than the alley you had inhabited for five or so years. But you still didn’t believe him; an offer like that was just far too good to be true. Surely there was a catch. The look on his face was sincere, though, and it cut short your doubt.

”…. you’re serious?”

He welcomed you home with open arms. He gave you the best damn warm meal you had eaten in half a decade. He gave you water, he gave you a spare pair of jeans, he gave you honest company. It never once crossed your mind that Ender was anything less than a savior by scooping you up off the streets and giving you a bed to sleep in (and under). You thought you had been living the high life by yourself with only alcohol and drugs until you realized how comforting it was to have company and someone to talk to. You still lived life by the bottle and needle but Ender and the others didn’t mind your habits – in fact, they had their own habits, but you never confronted them over it and they never confronted you over yours. They were honest and good people and you loved them.

Maybe now you’d have a new cadence to drum out.

so show me family
all the blood that i would bleed
i don’t know where i belong
i don’t know where i went wrong
but i can write a song

Ho, Hey – Lumineers