Fuckness by Andersen Prunty Read Free Book Online

actually one of the better punishments they had in store for me. That is, I didn’t really mind it too much. The best punishment was when they flat out gave me a beating and sent me to my room. That was the best punishment because it was over so quickly. Any beating was better than thinking you’re not going to get punished and then getting punished when you least expected it.
    One time I got in trouble for some stupid fuckness or the other and they didn’t say anything when I walked into the house. This was one of the first alternative punishments I can think of. So this one time there was no yelling or hitting and I didn’t bring up anything that happened at school and a couple hours went by with me at home and nothing happening. I stood by the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of ice water, thinking everything was just fine, like I’d got away with something, when the father barreled out of the living room on that wheelchair and rammed it straight into me. The hard steel hit me at the same level it usually did the cabinets and I thought that leg he hit, the left one, was broken. But I couldn’t say anything like, “What the fuck’re you doing?” because I knew that was part of my punishment. There was something inside of me that said I deserved the punishments. That it was just something I had to put up with. And the crazy fuck kept doing that for the rest of the night. I’d have my back turned and right when I heard that whirring and growling I’d try to move but it got me anyway. And it hurt like hell every time. You’d think I would have wised up after the second or third time, but that’s where my stupidity comes in. Was it stupidity or optimism? After every hit I told myself that had to be the last one. How could he think I could possibly take more than that?
    There was this other time I got all the way to bed thinking I wasn’t going to get punished and woke up the next morning with an incredibly bad haircut. It was that morning more than any other that I awoke wishing I wasn’t such a sound sleeper. We lived right behind some train tracks and that loud sound kind of dulled me to noises and fuckall, I think. So, because I slept so fucking heavy, I woke up and had these wild tufts of hair sticking up all over my head. I looked like a crazed chemotherapy patient. I wasn’t attracting anyone anyway, but that fucking ridiculous haircut made it even worse. Like I could give up all hope of ever attracting anyone, or even going unnoticed which, at that point, was the best thing I could really do. It worked too, the punishment that is. The kids at school taunted me for the next month, making all kinds of stupid remarks and jokes and fuckness. Like, “Hey, Wally had a fight with a lawnmower and the lawnmower won.” I must have heard that a hundred times by the end of the month and I wanted to smash all those blobby people’s teeth out. If you ever see someone who’s had a really bad haircut, you should never start all that shit about the lawnmower because they’ve probably heard the same thing three times that day. Some of them just called me “Leukemia Boy,” like leukemia’s a disease you get from jerking off or something. I’d never hated those blobs at that fucking school more than that month I had the really bad haircut. Did they think I didn’t know my hair was ridiculous?
    I eventually found the clippers and evened it out myself. I got hit for that. The mother busted her drinking glass against my face and strumbled, “I didn’t tell you you could do that yet.” She acted like I was some kid who was put on the couch for quiet time and got up before my fifteen minutes were served. She was a really vacant mean sick piece of blobshit.
    Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I never really knew how things were going to be when I walked in the door of my house. I braced myself that day I got thumped by Swarth. It felt like I had already been through so much. I didn’t really know how much more