Final Level Boss Witch
by Eliot S. Ku
Brendan’s mom would tell him that his dad’s new wife Melissa—the woman his dad had left them for—was a witch, and at that tender young age he had no reason to suspect it was untrue. The more Brendan thought about it, the more concretely he sensed that his stepmother (though he would never refer to her by that title out loud) did indeed possess a sort of feigned kindness, her scrunched-up smile ever so slightly snake-like and disingenuous. Although not overtly conscious of this fact, Brendan could sense that Melissa did not care for him, that he was merely an annoying reminder that his dad had a life before her. A life which was being systematically replaced by Melissa herself, with little room for Brendan in her vision of a picture-perfect romance with his father.
One day, Brendan was at Melissa’s house, sitting at the breakfast table with the two of them. Melissa ordered Brendan to take his feet off the table, to which he responded in turn, “Bite me.”
He had his personal justifications for acting this way. Melissa stared at him with concealed rage as his own father began a tirade of screaming. His dad sided with the witch, as was always the case. Although Brendan was far too young to understand why his dad would do so, he was no less wounded.
Amidst the shouting directed at him like a barrage of arrows, Brendan stood up from his chair and rushed to the kitchen sink where he filled a glass with water. He came back around the table before either his father or Melissa knew what he was planning, and he dumped the water over Melissa’s head. Brendan was shocked to find that the witch did not instantly melt into a black puddle surrounded by a cloud of acrid steam. Instead, she sat there in shock for a moment before soaring into a rage. Brendan’s dad joined in on the screaming that turned the kitchen into a monkey-house cacophony.
Melissa dragged him by the arm down the stairs, through the entertainment room and beyond the bar. On the bar top was a half-reclined, life-sized mermaid mannequin which always gave Brendan the chills. He closed his eyes tightly as they passed the mannequin’s medusa-like gaze. He was then pushed not quite forcefully but certainly not gently into one of the bedrooms and the door was shut behind him without a word or indication of how long his punishment would last.
It was his teenage stepbrother’s room (though he would never refer to him by that title out loud). The boy was away, probably doing delinquent things with his delinquent friends because that’s all Brendan knew of him from bits of conversations he had caught between the adults. Brendan hadn’t spoken but a few words to him ever. The years that separated them in age formed an unbridgeable chasm.
The house grew quiet again, and Brendan’s sobs gradually died down like the tail end of a great thunderstorm. The tears on his vermillion cheeks began to dry, but the anger remained. In this foreign bedroom adorned with adolescent miasma, Brendan distracted himself from his feelings. His first inclination was to find where the porno magazines were hidden, and he had a good sense of where they would be—after all, he had a dad, older brothers, and the dads and older brothers of his friends. Brendan hunched over and lifted the corner of the mattress, his little heart rattling in his chest like a bird in its cage in anticipation for the pages upon brittle pages of big boobs and hairy crotches, things he knew essentially nothing about but for which he was excited, nonetheless.
But what Brendan found was discordant with his expectations. Beneath the mattress lay a cache of twenty-dollar bills rubber banded into rolls, a ski mask, brass knuckles, ninja stars (!), a collection of knives, and even a small handgun. Brendan took it all in for a moment. The items glimmered back at him like the precious jewels of a treasure chest.
First, he pocketed the money. Then he gathered up all the arsenal of weaponry in his arms. Like an action hero, he found all the right places to equip his body so he could access each item just when it was needed.
Adorned like this, Brendan was granted a new and instantaneous feeling of armor against the world, as though he was in a video game conquest with several lives left to lose. The immediate future became clear. A vision amassed of all the hours of Super Nintendo, as well as the R-rated movies he wasn’t allowed to watch at home but had unlimited access to at his dad’s and sleepovers at friends’ houses. The vision was furthermore suffused with Brendan’s own bountiful imagination, one that had flourished as an escape from the reality of his fraught home life, in many ways replacing that very reality:
Brendan kicks the bedroom door open with the highest kick of his life. He storms down the hall back toward the entertainment room where he withdraws the largest hunting knife of the collection and lops the head off the mermaid mannequin. It goes spinning down the bar like a bowling ball, knocking over and breaking several martini glasses along its path. The first boss is eradicated. He sheaths his knife and continues along the warpath.
The turmoil is met with heavy footsteps from upstairs, the interval between steps becoming rapidly shorter like a Doppler effect as his dad reaches the top of the stairs.
There is a moment’s stalemate as Brendan stands at the bottom of the stairs, his dad at the top. They size each other up. But Brendan is no longer afraid of his dad’s anger. He sees Melissa appear from behind, peering down at him before rushing off again. Still, neither he, nor his dad moves.
“And what on earth do you intend to do with all of that?” his dad asks. He takes stock of his son who is adorned in a garish costume of weaponry like an all-American child soldier.
Brendan glares ahead as his lips curl into a grimace.
He charges up the steps, but his dad remains still, calling his bluff. When Brendan is a few steps away, Melissa appears once again. She holds out a keychain-sized canister of mace and sprays it without any apparent directionality. Brendan, as though he has been preparing for this offensive his whole life, slips on the ski mask and shuts his eyes as tightly as all the times he’s been forced to walk past the dreaded mermaid mannequin. His dad is caught up in friendly fire, temporarily blinded by the caustic mist. Spinning and flailing, he knocks the mace canister out of his wife’s hand before careening backward down the stairs. Brendan steps aside as his father rolls by like a boulder. Second boss down. The third and final to go.
Melissa retreats into the kitchen. Brendan relies on muscle memory to navigate his way up the remainder of the steps. Once he is in the kitchen, he opens his eyes. They sting and stream with tears. Tears induced by the mace, but too, the tears of sadness and rage he has suppressed for much time. All the things he has deeply and painfully felt in his fragile little body, but never found words to express. This allows him to see the enemy—the witch—with a special clarity. She stands frozen in terror like a bunny-rabbit facing an approaching lawnmower.
In these fateful few seconds, Brendan runs through his mind the sequence of weapons at his disposal. This is the final boss. The witch for whom water is a mere annoyance. He is going to have to use everything on her, to be sure. And as Brendan grasps the first ninja star between his index finger and thumb, his arm wound up like a pitcher, he takes aim directly between the witch’s eyes. He thinks of his mom and how proud she will be.
One day, Brendan was at Melissa’s house, sitting at the breakfast table with the two of them. Melissa ordered Brendan to take his feet off the table, to which he responded in turn, “Bite me.”
He had his personal justifications for acting this way. Melissa stared at him with concealed rage as his own father began a tirade of screaming. His dad sided with the witch, as was always the case. Although Brendan was far too young to understand why his dad would do so, he was no less wounded.
Amidst the shouting directed at him like a barrage of arrows, Brendan stood up from his chair and rushed to the kitchen sink where he filled a glass with water. He came back around the table before either his father or Melissa knew what he was planning, and he dumped the water over Melissa’s head. Brendan was shocked to find that the witch did not instantly melt into a black puddle surrounded by a cloud of acrid steam. Instead, she sat there in shock for a moment before soaring into a rage. Brendan’s dad joined in on the screaming that turned the kitchen into a monkey-house cacophony.
Melissa dragged him by the arm down the stairs, through the entertainment room and beyond the bar. On the bar top was a half-reclined, life-sized mermaid mannequin which always gave Brendan the chills. He closed his eyes tightly as they passed the mannequin’s medusa-like gaze. He was then pushed not quite forcefully but certainly not gently into one of the bedrooms and the door was shut behind him without a word or indication of how long his punishment would last.
It was his teenage stepbrother’s room (though he would never refer to him by that title out loud). The boy was away, probably doing delinquent things with his delinquent friends because that’s all Brendan knew of him from bits of conversations he had caught between the adults. Brendan hadn’t spoken but a few words to him ever. The years that separated them in age formed an unbridgeable chasm.
The house grew quiet again, and Brendan’s sobs gradually died down like the tail end of a great thunderstorm. The tears on his vermillion cheeks began to dry, but the anger remained. In this foreign bedroom adorned with adolescent miasma, Brendan distracted himself from his feelings. His first inclination was to find where the porno magazines were hidden, and he had a good sense of where they would be—after all, he had a dad, older brothers, and the dads and older brothers of his friends. Brendan hunched over and lifted the corner of the mattress, his little heart rattling in his chest like a bird in its cage in anticipation for the pages upon brittle pages of big boobs and hairy crotches, things he knew essentially nothing about but for which he was excited, nonetheless.
But what Brendan found was discordant with his expectations. Beneath the mattress lay a cache of twenty-dollar bills rubber banded into rolls, a ski mask, brass knuckles, ninja stars (!), a collection of knives, and even a small handgun. Brendan took it all in for a moment. The items glimmered back at him like the precious jewels of a treasure chest.
First, he pocketed the money. Then he gathered up all the arsenal of weaponry in his arms. Like an action hero, he found all the right places to equip his body so he could access each item just when it was needed.
Adorned like this, Brendan was granted a new and instantaneous feeling of armor against the world, as though he was in a video game conquest with several lives left to lose. The immediate future became clear. A vision amassed of all the hours of Super Nintendo, as well as the R-rated movies he wasn’t allowed to watch at home but had unlimited access to at his dad’s and sleepovers at friends’ houses. The vision was furthermore suffused with Brendan’s own bountiful imagination, one that had flourished as an escape from the reality of his fraught home life, in many ways replacing that very reality:
Brendan kicks the bedroom door open with the highest kick of his life. He storms down the hall back toward the entertainment room where he withdraws the largest hunting knife of the collection and lops the head off the mermaid mannequin. It goes spinning down the bar like a bowling ball, knocking over and breaking several martini glasses along its path. The first boss is eradicated. He sheaths his knife and continues along the warpath.
The turmoil is met with heavy footsteps from upstairs, the interval between steps becoming rapidly shorter like a Doppler effect as his dad reaches the top of the stairs.
There is a moment’s stalemate as Brendan stands at the bottom of the stairs, his dad at the top. They size each other up. But Brendan is no longer afraid of his dad’s anger. He sees Melissa appear from behind, peering down at him before rushing off again. Still, neither he, nor his dad moves.
“And what on earth do you intend to do with all of that?” his dad asks. He takes stock of his son who is adorned in a garish costume of weaponry like an all-American child soldier.
Brendan glares ahead as his lips curl into a grimace.
He charges up the steps, but his dad remains still, calling his bluff. When Brendan is a few steps away, Melissa appears once again. She holds out a keychain-sized canister of mace and sprays it without any apparent directionality. Brendan, as though he has been preparing for this offensive his whole life, slips on the ski mask and shuts his eyes as tightly as all the times he’s been forced to walk past the dreaded mermaid mannequin. His dad is caught up in friendly fire, temporarily blinded by the caustic mist. Spinning and flailing, he knocks the mace canister out of his wife’s hand before careening backward down the stairs. Brendan steps aside as his father rolls by like a boulder. Second boss down. The third and final to go.
Melissa retreats into the kitchen. Brendan relies on muscle memory to navigate his way up the remainder of the steps. Once he is in the kitchen, he opens his eyes. They sting and stream with tears. Tears induced by the mace, but too, the tears of sadness and rage he has suppressed for much time. All the things he has deeply and painfully felt in his fragile little body, but never found words to express. This allows him to see the enemy—the witch—with a special clarity. She stands frozen in terror like a bunny-rabbit facing an approaching lawnmower.
In these fateful few seconds, Brendan runs through his mind the sequence of weapons at his disposal. This is the final boss. The witch for whom water is a mere annoyance. He is going to have to use everything on her, to be sure. And as Brendan grasps the first ninja star between his index finger and thumb, his arm wound up like a pitcher, he takes aim directly between the witch’s eyes. He thinks of his mom and how proud she will be.
Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared in The Raven Review, Maudlin House, Whiskey Tit, HAD, Call Me Brackets, Bending Genres, and Carmen et Error, among other places.