Displacement by Michael Marano

A visualization of everything I’d hated about myself
before
I’d shattered myself in front of the bathroom mirror and pulled forth my victim: weak, whining (oh, how it used to whine so for mercy while I imagined torturing it), and pathetic.
    Thirst forgotten, I limped to bed.
    But wondering if this small totem of self-hate had been with me since birth, I didn’t sleep that night.
    Nor the next.
    —No. It was an
it
. Not human. Like a gremlin.
    —Did you imagine it to be not human so it would be easier to hurt? I watched the bank of phantom pipe smoke float between me and Doctor Johansson. The sun, creaking to the west, came from behind a cloud, and shadows from the thick window bars bled onto the smoke like slashes. I wondered if the yellowed air filter in the corner could draw the smoke that was not there.
    —I don’t think I’d have been as fond of hurting it, if it had been easy to hurt.
    —Did it have a name?
    The shadow bars faded. I don’t know how long I must have been silent for the clouds to hide the sun again. How much of this day had I spent in fugue-like silence? I was afraid to answer, to speak the Name I had never spoken, and invoke whatever hidden power might be knotted within that Name.
    —I gave it a stupid sort of kid’s name: Piggy.
    Nothing changed with the invocation of the Name. I watched Doctor Johansson’s eyes, to make sure he didn’t think the name funny. Or trite. It would embarrass me if he did.
    —Why did he have that name?
    —I think I gave it to him because he was kind of baby-pink, like a pig, or a puppy’s belly. It seemed to fit. I’d never heard the name before I gave it to him. Maybe the name floated in the ether as the name of victim, and I picked it up. I’d never heard of any victim character named Piggy until high school.
    The phantom smoke dulled the glass-hard reality before my eyes. The effect was soothing, yet I still felt a dread between my shoulder blades, that the Name so long unspoken might still reveal a potential that had been dormant.
    —What did you do when you ah . . . punished Piggy?
    —Most often, I’d shut myself away and throw punches at it. Before that there had to be the chase, where I’d look all over the room to see where it was hiding. Then I’d drag it from the hiding place by the roots of its hair. And then I’d start beating it.
    —And this was like imaginary play?
    — I’d swing and kick at where I imagined Piggy to be. I’d get something like a sugar high during the punishment. My vision would get grey and buzzing. I’d be spent afterward.
    —Did you talk to it?
    —Sometimes I’d speak to it, to re-enforce the punishment. Things I’d learned from my father. Things like,
Come out and take your medicine, you little shit!
    —Did Piggy say anything?
    —Mostly it just begged not to be hit. Sometimes I’d imagine it screaming.
    —You never had conversations with it? Like most kids do with imaginary friends?
    —We weren’t on speaking terms.
    —Sort of like you and your parents.
    His insight struck me like a heavy boot. The tumours nestled in me felt as if they shifted, like waking things.
    —Yes. Like me and my parents.
    —In fact, you were its parent. At least as you understood parents to be.
    Realization
is the crash of a thing you didn’t know. What turned my guts to clay was not realization, but the stripping away of a
refusal
to know that the proportions of the creature, as I’d first imagined it, were the same as I had been proportioned to my father.
    —I suppose I was.
    —How old were you when you gave up Piggy?
    —About eleven or twelve.
    That wasn’t entirely true. The last time I’d used Piggy was about a year ago, the day I was diagnosed, the day all the nagging fears bloomed to awful fruition, when the worries about the bloody stools, cramps and fatigue boulder-crashed upon me and shattered whatever hope for a life I’d ever had.
    The world had chewed me and spat me out. I drunk-stumbled home from the