The Crematory

For seven years, Delmer knew nothing but that decaying farm. His father, reeking perpetually of whiskey and something fouler, kept him isolated like a shameful secret. His mother entertained "visitors" in the bedroom above the kitchen, and young Delmer learned to recognize the creak of certain floorboards, the rhythm of footsteps that weren't his father's. He learned to make himself small, invisible, a shadow in his own home.

When his mother finally sent him to school, Delmer discovered that other children lived in a different world entirely. They arrived in clean clothes that fit. Their teeth gleamed white when they smiled. They walked without dragging a twisted foot behind them, without the pronounced lisp that made the other children mock him in sing-song voices during recess.

But it was the smell that isolated him most—a persistent odor of ash and decay that clung to his ragged clothes, his unwashed hair, his skin. The other children held their noses and called him "Crematory Boy," though Delmer didn't understand why until much later.

He never fought back. Never raised his voice. He absorbed each cruelty like a sponge soaking up poison, storing it all in the hollow place behind his ribs where normal children kept hope.

The crematory hunched behind the farmhouse like a malevolent chapel, built from blackened brick that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Delmer's father had once run a thriving business there, before the alcohol transformed him into something that barely resembled a man. Now the building stood abandoned, its iron door sealed with rust and neglect.

One autumn afternoon, when the sky hung low and gray as a burial shroud, Delmer approached the crematory alone. The door opened at his touch—easily, despite the rust, as if it had been waiting for him.

Inside, the furnace dominated the space like a sleeping god. Delmer had never seen it operational, but his fingers found the controls with unsettling familiarity. When he turned the valve, gas hissed through ancient pipes. The pilot light caught with a sound like an indrawn breath.

The flames erupted with unnatural eagerness, roaring to life in shades of blue and white and colors that shouldn't exist in normal fire. The heat that rolled out wasn't merely warmth—it was a presence, an awareness that wrapped around Delmer like invisible arms.

For the first time in his short, miserable life, Delmer felt seen. Understood. Welcomed.

He pulled up his father's old stool and sat before the furnace, speaking to it in his lisping voice. He told it everything—about the laughter at school, about his mother's visitors, about his father's belt, and the taste of blood in his mouth after beatings. The flames danced and flickered as if listening, and Delmer could almost hear words in their crackling whisper.

His father found him there three days later.

Delmer had been returning to the crematory each day after school, keeping the furnace fed and burning. He'd stopped going to classes altogether that final day, lost in communion with the fire that had become his only friend.

"BOY!" His father's roar shattered the moment. The man stood swaying in the doorway, silhouetted against the dying afternoon light, a fresh bottle clutched in one fist. "What the HELL are you doing down here? I told you—NEVER—come—HERE!"

Each word was punctuated by a stumbling step forward. The stench of whiskey rolled off him in waves, mixed with the sour-sweet smell of vomit and unwashed flesh.

"I'm sorry," Delmer whispered, but his eyes stayed fixed on the furnace, where the flames seemed to grow taller, more agitated.

"Sorry? SORRY?" His father's laugh was a diseased thing. "I'll show you sorry. Bend over that table, boy. The time you learned what happens when you disobey."