Apophis

You’ve met men like him. Maybe only once. Maybe just long enough to feel the air change.

They enter rooms already convinced of their own importance, head high, chest lifted, reading every face as if the world were a mirror. Apophis was that kind of boy. He grew into the kind of man people excuse too easily and remember too late.

From early on, he worshipped one thing: himself. He mistook being male for being superior. He handed down little pronouncements as if they were law: “men wear T-shirts like this!” to girls half his size. To him, women existed mainly as proof that he was not one.

There was always something foul beneath the swagger.

Indulged for no better reason than having been born male, Apophis learned early that he could move through a room and leave no trace but the damage. He slipped through back doors, grinned through lies, stole from the very people who fed him, and treated shame as something for other people to carry.

Some of his “games” were not games at all.

He used to grab me and place me on top of his narrow frame, bouncing me up and down while he lay flat beneath me. I was too young to understand what I was feeling, only that it was wrong. Uncomfortable. Strange. I would stare at the ceiling, as if there might be something written there I was supposed to understand.

There was nothing written there.

One afternoon we heard my mother’s heels striking the parquet floor. Apophis froze, then flung me onto the other bed so fast I barely had time to register it. I landed quietly. He straightened himself. By the time she entered, nothing had happened. At least nothing that could be named.

That was his gift.

To do what he did and leave silence holding the bag.

Later he stole from his father, passed out in a room that always seemed stained by drink and neglect. He stole his mother’s cheap jewelry to impress whichever girl he was after. He took money from the same woman who defended him, spinning talk of “investment,” then shrugged when it vanished.

Years passed. Apophis married. Cheated. Married again. A daughter was born along the way, though he always seemed more interested in sons he could imagine as extensions of himself.

Now he is older, stiffer, better dressed. He stops by the rest home where his mother sits and spends more time on his phone than in her presence. He leaves before her tea cools.

Age has changed the angles of his face, but not the nature underneath.

Apophis is still Apophis.