Intelligence

I always looked for signs of intelligence in my own children that I felt were overlooked by conventional tests. I worked an overnight shift, and I used to come home around 7am. If I worked the weekend, Saturday and Sunday morning Heidi, the youngest, would be up watching cartoons. When she was really young she would watch the news because she didn't know how to change the channel, God that was cute. Saturday and Sunday mornings she was bright eyed and bushy tailed. Monday mornings you'd need a crowbar to get her out of bed to get ready for school. Intelligence. She wanted to maximize her weekend...I feared the time she got old enough to party...it terrified me...now she'll never see it. That terrifies me more.

Jackie was different. She would sleep as long as you would let her which was never long enough because she was a terror. Five minutes after she woke up, she'd be bouncing off the walls. She was diagnosed as being autistic...high functioning...she always told me she loved me and asked for a kiss but she never gave me a kiss. I always thought maybe she was just odd. She'd play these games, the type that kids play. It was so cute to watch because she made up all these intricate details, interpersonal stuff that a 7 year old doesn't get. Intelligence.

My wife, Melissa, I called her Lissa. She was the most anxiety ridden woman I have ever met. When she was pregnant with Heidi, she stopped taking her Anxiety medication. I almost ran headfirst into the woodchipper. It was that bad...I used to call her stupid a lot. No intelligence.

It was more than worrying. Everybody worries. I worried myself once the reports surfaced of the flu being deadly, the World Health Organization claiming pandemic. Lissa, she wouldn't leave the house. She became a shut in. She got fired from work...the bills started piling up. They'd have cut off our electricity if they'd had anyone well enough to turn it off. When the power finally did go out, it went out for everyone. Lissa screamed for three hours. The girls cried and cried. I yelled. I yelled a lot.

We had food in the pantry to start with, I'd always stocked up on...well, everything. I'm no survivalist but who knows, shit happens. Natural disasters, man made disasters, whatever. We plowed through most of that in a week. All we had left was canned peas, Lissa wouldn't eat them and she'd passed that on to the girls who were far more picky than their mother. I ate them. I ate them in front of them while they starved and told them how stupid they were. I packed up my rucksack and loaded my hunting rifle and I went out looking for food to feed my family. That was in the morning. Before the sun had reached noon I had abandoned the rucksack, a good portion of ammunition and my best hunting cap in favor of my life and made it to the house just before a horde of them landed on my doorstep. Simple math in the end. I get tired, the dead do not.

By the time I got home, Lissa and the girls were gone. The house was quiet, solemn, dark. The girls lit up the room even without power. There was not so much as a breath, the house was cold.

She'd used the pistol I'd left her, one of my favorites. Stainless steel, .357. A real beauty. There was nothing left of Heidi's face. She'd shot her from behind. Jackie, she'd pretty been praying. Something Bex always had her do, to focus her for bedtime. A ritual. For herself, well, we always kept sleeping pills in the house. She had trouble sleeping. She didn't leave a note. Just a great big bowl of canned peas on the counter...empty box of rat poison sitting next to it with a spoon on top.

I always looked for intelligence in my family. Signs that there was something there I'd given them instead of my wife's stupidity...turns out they were all smarter than me after all.