Bites

He bit himself on the arm when he got angry.

As a little boy, that is. Usually on the right arm, about an inch or two above the crook of the elbow.

He’d bite pretty hard, too. The pain of it distracted from how furious he felt, because mommy wouldn’t let him go play N64 at Oscar’s house or daddy wanted him to spend Saturday afternoon cleaning out the garage. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. It hurt something awful because he was merciless with himself, but at least this way there was something he could do. Something he could have control over when he felt powerless, although he wouldn’t have expressed it that way at the time.

So as soon as he got a free moment from clearing out the Legos, Power Rangers, and Luke Skywalker figurines in the garage he’d run back to his room, shut his door (which neither mommy nor daddy liked very much) and tear into his arm with his teeth. He’d ball up his hands into little fists and hit his legs till they went numb. He’d pull on his hair till the pain seared so bad he couldn’t pull any harder. He’d hold his pillow to his face and scream and scream and scream until at last his fury had spent itself. Then he’d lay panting on his bed, heart throbbing.

After that he’d go straight back to the garage and get back to work.

It wasn’t like he could complain about it, or anything. They wouldn’t have listened. And anyway, if daddy was in a bad mood that might just make things worse. Not that daddy beat him, or anything. No, he never even lay a finger on his little boy. But he did have a bit of a temper in his own way, and the slightest backtalk from the boy would mean he’d be cleaning out the family Chevy just as soon as he finished up the garage.

No. Better to bite his tongue and sit it out. Parents were for pleasing, not sharing your emotions with — although, again, he wouldn’t have expressed it that way at that age.

I said he tried to avoid biting his arm hard enough to leave any marks. Well, that’s because Henrietta spotted the bruise on his arm, which he’d been trying to hide with his sleeve one afternoon after vacuuming the inside of the Chevy.

He was sitting in his room playing Spyro the Dragon when she knocked on the door. He asked who it was, although he already knew who it was since she was the only one in the house who knocked before entering his room. After waiting just a moment, during which time the little purple dragon on his screen ran up to and freed an enormous dragon trapped in crystal, he told Henrietta she could come in.

“Thank you for releasing me!” piped the squeaky-voiced dragon. Once the dragon disappeared, the boy paused the game and waited for Henny.

“Whatcha up to, little brother?” Henny asked, poking her head in through the door.

“Just playing Spyro. You’re supposed to free the dragons that the bad guy froze.”

“Sounds like fun,” Henny said in a politely interested but actually not at all interested sort of way. Her little brother was about to start up the game again when she asked, “What’s that on your arm?”

He glanced at the faint purple ring peeking out from under the hem of his sleeve. Flushing red, he pulled the sleeve down, his lips working as he fumbled to come up with some kind of excuse. No doubt the wide-eyed expression on his face would have given him away, even had he managed to come up with something before she asked, “Did you bite yourself?”

He didn’t meet her eyes, instead trying to seem absorbed in examining the paused screen on the TV. Henny stood silently, expectation drawn in her raised eyebrows. The boy sighed and faced her, still avoiding eye contact.

At last he nodded. Henny was already fourteen years old and he wasn’t even ten yet, so what was the point of hiding anything from someone so experienced?

“That’s really self-destructive,” Henny said. “You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“I know,” he said, even though he’d never heard the word self-destructive before, at least outside of Star Trek. “You’re not gonna tell mom and dad, are you?”

Henny promised she wouldn’t, and in all the years that followed she never said a word about it.

The boy tried to stop biting himself and beating himself up from then on, but sometimes he got so angry he just couldn’t help it. As the years went by he did it less and less often, although the severity of the bites increased with the onset of puberty. The last time he ever did it he was a sophomore in high school, maybe a junior.

He drank a lot as he grew into adulthood, and as his twenties turned into his thirties he still hadn’t lived up to the potential his parents and teachers had seen in him. The arm-biting rarely crossed his mind, if he even remembered it at all. Working odd jobs here and there, he did his best to be charming, never letting on what went on in his head. Not quite as successful with the ladies as he would’ve liked (who is?), he nonetheless pulled better than most — although he strictly avoided letting any of them get too close.

But whenever he quit drinking for more than two or three days on end, a festering rage would rise up in him. He couldn’t bear to feel it and soon went back to the bottle.

When he finally decided to hang himself, they found a purplish ring-shaped bruise a couple inches above the crook of his right arm.