Laura Leigh Morris: THE TRUE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL

Flash by Laura Leigh Morris
THE TRUE STORY OF CAIN AND ABEL

You try to love them right—use all the gentle parenting everyone’s raving about, make sure they eat grow food before fairy food, move to the best school district—and none of it does a bit of good, not in the grand scheme of things anyway.

Take Cain. He was smart, always bringing home straight A’s. On the robotics team, and we all expected him to get a full scholarship to one of those good schools—MIT or Stanford.

Except along comes Abel who’s a real nice boy, good at baseball, but can’t do algebra to save his life. I mean, he wasn’t an idiot. He kept his grades high enough to play sports, but that’s about it.

And we all went along like that for years—me taking Cain to Math Field Day and the Academic Decathlon, Adam cheering from behind the fence through Abel’s double-headers and spending evenings helping him perfect his swing.

Adam’s dad came along and fucked everything up. He showed up a few times a year and spent the whole time saying, “Abel, my boy, let’s see that arm.” He whistled through his teeth after Abel threw a fastball that made Adam’s palm sting. Then he walked past Cain curled up at the corner of the couch, nose in a book, and slapped its spine so hard it flew in the air. He walked away laughing while Cain sat there in tears. When Adam told his dad to stop, he said, “Boy needs some toughening up.”

It’s no wonder on his last visit, when he showed up with a brand-new metal alloy bat for Abel and nothing for his brother, all Cain’s pent-up anger came out. Now, he probably should have gone after his grandfather with that bat, but Abel took the brunt of all his rage, even though he hadn’t done a damned thing except be a boy who liked sports.

Of course I cried. What kind of mother wouldn’t? I felt like I might die when we found Abel the next morning, crumpled and bloody and broken on the basement floor. Cain sat in his usual place on the couch, face in a book. He didn’t confess. He didn’t have to. We could see it in his stony face, eyes red and swollen from crying. It hurt almost as bad when they took him away as it did when we saw Abel’s body. I mean, look at what was left of my life: a house that had been full to the brim with boys suddenly quiet, Adam too sad and angry to look at me, their grandfather nowhere to be found.

But they ask, would you do it again, Eve? Would you do it again if you knew?

And I look them in the eye and say yes. A million times yes.

Laura Leigh Morris is the author of The Stone Catchers: A Novel (2024), a finalist for the Willie Morris Award, the Weatherford Award, and WCONA Book of the Year, as well as Jaws of Life: Stories (2018). She’s previously published short fiction and essays in STORY Magazine, North American Review, The Florida Review, and other journals. She teaches writing at Furman University in Greenville, SC. To learn more, visit www.lauraleighmorris.com.