Get Up

Atilla woke up when the bright rays of the sun shone upon his delicate skin. The star’s rays warmed their way across his youthful face, waking him up with their delicate touch. He woke up with a smile, ready to take on the world once again. That is if his anhedonic mother would allow him to do so. Atilla shook the blanket off himself and got ready for a new day. The young boy swung his bedroom door open, ready to conquer the world, but the mere sight of his mother shattered his hopes and dreams for the day.

She looked gray, pale, thin, and almost lifeless, like a reanimated corpse waiting to fall apart before his eyes. She stared at him, her cold, dead blue eyes pierced into his soul. “Good morning. Eat your breakfast before it gets cold,” she said in a monotone voice. Her presence alone was enough to crush any enthusiasm inside the young boy. It’s like it was perpetually storming inside of their house. A microcosm of misery and poor weather. Atilla’s mother wasn’t abusive. She just wasn’t much of a mother. She simply wasn’t there, and when she was, her pained existence weighed down on her child. Atilla faked a smile, hiding his discomfort at the shape of his mother, and uttered, “Good morning…”

He then made his way slowly to the bathroom, almost as if his mother’s condition sucked the life force out of him.

After brushing his teeth, the young lad made his way down to the kitchen. A bowl of boring oatmeal awaited him on the table with some boring black tea. Atilla’s mother kept on saying how he’s too young for coffee and shouldn’t ruin his health with that drink. The boy sat down to eat his tasteless breakfast as his mother shuffled around the house before heading back to her bedroom.

The sun shone brightly, and the voices of children outside beckoned on Atilla to join them in their joy. Stuffing down the oatmeal, the boy tried to feign pleasure just in case his mother might come down again. He hated whenever she complained about her perpetual misery seemingly over nothing. In his young mind, he couldn’t fully comprehend her condition or its origin. For him, she seemed sad over nothing, had he only known that she wasn’t in control of herself. She wanted to be a better mother – to show more love. To help her child be happy, but she couldn’t. She was stuck in an endless cycle of melancholy and mental agony.

The boy sat there, eating his breakfast and staring into the kitchen window. The sun shone, the wind blew pleasantly warm, the birds chirped and the daughter of Mrs. Szeseni was offering Lemonade to people. He never caught the girl’s name. She was pretty in his eyes, and for some reason, he couldn’t find the words to speak to her, so he never even bothered asking.

As Atilla was finishing his tea, one of his friends, Joszef, came down to his kitchen window, calling to him.

“Hey, Atilla!”

“Hey, Joszy!” the boy called out in return.

“Do you wanna come to play football with me and the boys?”

“I’d love to, but first I have to see if the mom left the keys in the door.”

“Why does she keep hiding the keys away from you?”

“I don’t know, Joszy…”

“Your mom’s weird.”

“I know…”

“Alright, go look, I don’t have much time before our next match starts, come on quickly so you could join us now.”

Atilla swiftly ran to the front door, looking for the door keys his mother hopefully left in the door. After a quick search, he realized that the keys were nowhere in sight. He screamed in frustration. She hid the keys again. She confined him to the house again, forcing him to stay indoors while the world outside danced and sang.

The boy’s face turned red with anger and frustration as he made his way back to the kitchen, defeated. “She hid the keys again.” He muttered angrily to his friend, Joszy who stared at him both bemused and disappointed at once.

“That sucks, Atilla… I hope you can run away from your mother one day. She’s a freak,” said the boy before running off to his next game of ball.

Atilla didn’t even have the time to scold him for referring to his mother as a freak. Deep inside though, he had known that Joszy was right. His mother wasn’t right. Atilla put the dishes into the sink and made his way to his mother’s room. He was curious to see what she’d be doing now in her room.

He opened the door to his mother’s bedroom to find the blinds closed. The air seemed to stand in the room. There was an awful smell of mold coming from within that room. The window must’ve been closed again for days on end. The young boy called out, “Mom?” She didn’t respond.

“You’re sleeping again already… huh…” A familiar situation to Atilla, his mother would wake up, fix him something to eat and throw herself back into that room he came to consider as a hellscape of some sorts. He even theorized that her room might be the reason for all of her troubles, and his by extension.

Atilla hated staying in that room for more than a few moments. If he ever did stay long enough, he’d start feeling like something is watching him, like something is trying to enter inside his mouth. Something felt very wrong, very much unnatural in that room. Maybe it was the darkness or the unpleasant smell. Atilla couldn’t put the finger on it, but something made him hate that room. Perhaps it was the fact it was his mother’s. He didn’t know.

Leaving his mother’s room, defeated once more and on the verge of an emotional breakdown, Atilla stumbled back into his own room. He lied on his bed, closing his eyes. A skin burning tear ran down his face. He muttered to himself, “Imagine being named Atilla and being stuck in this ugly old house all the time…”

The young boy knew whom his parents named him after, the legendary Nomadic warlord that roamed across Europe and ravaged the Roman empire. A hero in his native lands and a distant ancestor.

Lying on his bed, Atilla imagined the sound of dozens of horses galloping getting closer and closer to him. Coming from a place far beyond the walls of his golden cage of a house. In his mind, the noise got louder and louder. It kept getting louder until he could almost feel the ground shaking beneath him. The force of the hooves of the majestic beasts beating against it became almost tangible. The noise grew louder with each passing moment, and the ground shook beneath the boy’s bed more violently. He found himself growing excited at the prospect of encountering a band of wild horses galloping straight past him.

He took a deep breath, and at a moment’s notice, a loud crack echoed all around him. The noise that comes out of an egg being cracked, multiplied by many thousands. Atilla opened his eyes and in front of him, frozen in time, a horde of Asiatic nomads suspended, in mid-flight. They were all dressed in dried skins and furs, their garbs colored in a beautiful mixture of brown and orange. The boy smiled at the horses, and the nomads flew past him. He didn’t even notice the walls of the house crumbling behind them like a discarded puzzle. All the nomads kept on riding but one, a young, beautiful woman. She stood across the now devastated shell of a room and reached out to the young boy. She said something in a tongue he’d never heard before, but he understood her perfectly. She was calling out to him to come with her.

Without a second thought, Atilla jumped up from his dust-covered bed and ran towards the female nomad who pulled him up on top of her horse. Yelling in a strange language, she commanded the horse to gallop on.

The boy had never experienced such joy as he did when he rode on that horse. The wind blew pleasantly across his face, the world flashed all around him in beautiful shades of blue, brown, green and gray. The boy could see the sun, it was smiling at him, along with the clouds up above.

They smiled and sang, slurring words in a matter that made the young boy laugh. It reminded me of how his father used to laugh. Their faces, they started reminding him of his father’s when he drank that sour liquid he used to drink. His eyes started to well up as the memories of his father came flooding his mind. He turned his eyes away and looked at the view ahead. Trying to cheer himself up, the songs of nature seemed to distract him quickly enough.

The whole world sang and danced around Atilla and his band of nomadic horsemen as he rode through what seemed to be like an eternal sea of green grassland. Suddenly, however, he heard a familiar voice. A painful voice, something that made him cringe and caused his face to contort in discomfort. A dry, scornful voice. One that sounded like metal spikes being dragged across a metal board. Atilla poked his head beside the female rider’s body and saw in the distance, a familiar wrinkled and gray face, a mug that looked as if it had been placed in a dryer for too long, lost of its color, and then worn as a mask by some depressive demonic entity that only wanted to torture children and take away their fun. The face was irritatingly familiar to Atilla. It was Mr. Szenes. The neighborhood menace – an old man who hated everyone and everything. He stood there in his white clothes, pointing his finger at the galloping horses and cursing them out. His voice felt like knives being jammed in Atilla’s ears. He cried out “make him stop” and one of the nomads threw a lasso in the old man’s direction.

The rope locked around the gray neck of the gray menace and tightened around its frail shape. The nomad yanked the screeching old man off his feet and dragged him across the ground. As the old wench was being dragged across the vast plains, he squealed like a pig, making the young boy laugh.

The horde kept on riding for another hour or two before coming across a strange sight. A band of anthropomorphic beasts of all kinds, there were goats and bears. Tigers and eagles, bulls and cats, and even an ape. Atilla stared, clearly amused as the beasts marched on in front of the horde. When the horde was close enough to make out the details of the beast, Atilla could see the beasts playing various strange instruments. They had fancy leathery drums and strange stringed instruments with dragon heads on the handles. The Monkey carried a sort of pipe, and the beasts played to their heart’s content.

The horde ceased their advance, and the beasts stopped their movements as well. One of the bears noticed Atilla and waved at him, to which the boy waved in return. The nomads attempted communicating to the beasts to move aside, but the creatures wouldn’t budge. They stood their ground while playing their instruments carelessly.

The nomads stood there for a while. They grew restless with the situation, hushed whispers of discontent ripped through the nomadic horde. Eventually, even Atilla himself got tired of waiting. He inhaled deeply and yelled out at the top of his lungs for the horde to charge. His cry startled the horses so much they started galloping wildly, nearly knocking off some of the nomads. Cheers and laughter from the horde eclipsed the music played by the anthropomorphic beasts.

The creatures refused to move and were run over by the panicked horses. The music died out abruptly. An explosion of fur, musical instruments, and animal heads flew all around the horde. The sight was so strange and unique Atilla tried his best to make sense of it all while soaking in the absurd glory of it all. Soon enough the tidal wave organs settled down on the ground and the horde kept on galloping onwards.

Atilla looked back once he heard the strange music playing again behind him. To his shock, the anthropomorphic stood back up, headless now. Musical notes came from inside their necks instead of the discarded instruments. The beasts stood there, juggling their own heads. A bird’s head even winked at the boy who nearly fell off his horse due to the shock.

The sun set down before Atilla even noticed, and a goofy-faced moon took its place in the night’s sky. Atilla looked at the long silent body of Mr. Szenes, only to find the body of a man-faced pig being dragged across the grassland. It was fat and inviting in all parts but its head. The dome had the form of the head of the old grump who tried ruining every last bit of fun in everyone’s life. The boy’s stomach twisted and turned, gnawing in hunger. He looked away for a moment and then closed his eyes.

Opening them not a second later, Atilla snapped himself out of his fantasy world. He had spent most of that day lying on his bed. The boy burned hours imagining a better world where he could spend the day outside with majestic nomads in a vast grassland. A world where the sun and clouds were happy and sang slurred songs to him. His stomach turned again, forcing him to get out of bed and make his way towards the kitchen.

Once there, he failed to find an adequate meal, he called out to his mother, but she didn’t answer his calls. Sighing with slight annoyance, Atilla made his way, upset all over again, to his mother’s room. He knocked on the door, calling her name, but nothing but silence answered his calls. He gulped and pushed the door handle downwards. Atilla hated going into that room. It was like going into the worst storm ever naked. It was like stepping inside an emotional black hole where everything other than the will to die was sucked out of him. The wooden door creaked as he pushed it open. The darkness from within the room seemed to take over the orange light of the setting sun.

“Mama?” Atilla called out as he stepped inside the dark room.

“Mama?” he called again, walking deeper into the room.

Still no answer, Atilla made his way to his mother’s bed, she was there. Asleep. Cuddled up under her blanket, her skin seemed pale and stretched out. She seemed so peaceful, and the boy didn’t want to wake her up. His stomach growled at him, demanding a meal. His hunger taking the better of him, Atilla called out his mother’s name again – but she remained asleep.

The boy decided he had to shake her. Shaking her body, she wouldn’t stir. She remained transfixed in her dreams, in a world far away from the child who was hungry and becoming increasingly upset at her.

“Wake up mom!”

“Get up, mom, get up!”

“I want to eat, get up, please.”

The boy cried, but the woman wouldn’t budge.

Atilla shook her one last time, and a pill bottle fell from one of her hands, a pill bottle labeled “pain pills.”

As the pill bottle rolled on the floor and under the bed, the boy cried out at the top of his lungs, “Wake up, mama! Wake up!”