Page 23

She’s crying again, her wails piercing my ears as father drags her through the house by her long hair, her legs kicking frantically behind her, her dress torn into limp rags.

“Stop! Stop!” I scream, trying to block the sounds of her fear and pain with my hands as I chase behind them. “Please father, don’t.”

She’s never done anything to deserve the abuse he puts her through. She’s the best mother ever, with her kind eyes, soft-spoken words, and her gentle healing touch. She suffers at his brutal hands daily, and as he pulls her across the carpet, burning her back with the friction, I for once, at eight years old try to fight back for her. I can’t take it anymore; I can’t stand aside or hide from it. She needs me.

“And what do you think you’re going to do?” Father yells, slapping me across the face hard as I grab at his arms, trying to get him to let her go, digging my nails into the leather sleeve of his riding jacket.

“Please father, no.” I wail, ignoring the searing pain in my cheek as I let him go and grab at mother, trying to pull her away from him.

I’m too little, and too weak to get her from his grasp, so I hold onto her for dear life, making him pull me along with them, my little feet tripping over themselves, threatening to fail me like hers fail her.

We go through the den, and into the kitchen, her favorite place that still smells like the delicious chocolate chip muffins she baked me for breakfast. I don’t want him to hurt her here. I don’t want mother to fear her place of solace. It’s the only place she has where her pretty eyes still smile.

“Father, don’t.”

Throwing her to the marble floor, he grabs me instead, lifting me by my hair until my feet dangle under me, not touching the ground.

“You’re just as useless as her. A weak, pathetic excuse for a child.” He spits in my face, his eyes burning like an untamed fire with the rage behind them.

If I knew what the devil looked like besides what I’ve seen sketched in the old books in the library, I would think he is him. He’s evil in the flesh. His face is twisted up, his lips are curled, and his dark brows are pinched together.

The first punch sends my body flying backwards, only staying in place by the hold on my hair. I’m like the punching bag in his gym, swinging with each hit, yet tethered in place by the “hook” that holds me. He hits me over and over again, his fist pounding into my chest, my belly and my face.

I’m nauseated, wanting to puke from the force of the blows on my stomach but I know better, to vomit on him would be the death of me. Father would never accept the disrespect of me dirtying his shoes, so I hold it in, forcing the bile down with heavy swallows between each excruciatingly painful hit.

When he tires of the beating, I land on the floor with a heavy thud, my bones crumbling uselessly under me. I can’t move. I can’t crawl to her. I can’t save her as he turns his attention to my barely conscious mother lying on the floor in a heap, just like me.

Her face is bloodied, her limbs bent awkwardly, and she flops like a ragdoll when he lifts her up and tosses her over the island where she preps her meals. Her head bashes into the butcher block counter top, cracking loudly. It’s not that loud a sound though that turns my blood cold. It’s the quiet unzipping of his pants and the ripping of her panties.

I’m helpless, useless as he called me as I try with all my might to get to her but can’t. All I can do is watch as he defiles her over and over again, grunting disgustingly as he takes out all his aggressions on her body, killing her soul and mine along with it.

“Nooo!” My one screamed word echoes off the walls of my vast bedroom as I fly up into a sitting position, reaching out in the dark for the woman who will never be there again for me.

My chest heaves with my panted breath, and I’m covered in sweat, my body slickly sliding over the satiny sheets. My eyes can’t focus, and my ears still hear her wailing cries of pain. The nightmare has faded, but the pain that’s risen from my subconscious still plagues me as I come back to the here and now.

“Hedeon?”

The voice is foreign in my frantic state, calling out to me from the dark, and in my panic, with the lingering need to save my mother, I lash out, striking my hand towards the sound of what my father named me. A pained woman’s grunt fills my ears, pushing away the remnants of the nightmare, sounding just like my mother’s only not the same. The sound isn’t Russian. It’s not my mother. It’s Lily.

“Lily? Princess?” I call out to her, fishing in the dark towards the whimpered noises coming from the bed beside me. “Lily, baby. Where are you?”

My room has never seemed so dark before, like a cave where no light seeps in and it plays tricks with your eyes in the utter blackness. Seeking her out, feeling with my hands, I find something warm and wet, and when I brush my fingertips against it, the soft mewl becomes a cry of agony.

Blood. I can smell the thick coppery scent as I rub my fingers together, smearing it onto my skin. She’s bleeding again, but this time not for me, but because of me. I hit a woman. Not a whore, not someone who deserved it, just an innocent woman who’s still in my bed. An innocent woman like my mother.

“Lily, baby please.” I call out throwing myself over, reaching for the lamp on the nightstand, fumbling for it, knocking over God knows what in my haste.

The light finally clicks on, blinding me, making me rub my eyes which only smears her blood across my face. I’m frantically looking for her, wiping at my skin, imaging that I now look like how she must see me sometimes. Like a monster.

“H.” She sniffles, and I finally find her, touching her everywhere, searching her for any wounds I cannot see as my eyes adjust and she comes into focus.

She’s afraid, huddled against the headboard, her knees pulled up to her chest, her head bowed, protecting itself from any more strikes of my fist.

“Princess, I’m sorry.” I say, trying to touch her face, to stroke over where she bleeds to show her I’m no longer a threat.

Who the fuck am I kidding though, I am a threat to her, to everyone. I’m fucked up in the head and in the dead heart that sits like a rock in my chest. I am evil, a demon spawned by the devil himself, cursed to live in a hell of my own making, one that until now, I never thought was wrong.

It's not wrong. You’re just too close to her. Women are just possessions to be used and tossed away when we’ve had our fill.

The voice in my head sounds like someone completely different than the one of reason that usually speaks to me. It’s more sinister, curdling up my stomach, making me sick. It’s father’s.

“No, this is just from the nightmare.” I grumble, climbing off the bed, leaving her there shielding herself from nothing as I run into the bathroom and vomit up the little bit of bile in my stomach, just like I did when I was young, and father would hurt mother.

You can’t fight who you are Hedeon.

“Shut up! Stop talking you prick!” I scream into the toilet bowl, retching and gagging. “Fuck you! Fuck you right to hell where I put you!”

“H?” The tiny one syllable breaks through the fog in my head, resounding over my back curling hurls into the throne. “H, are you okay?”

I can’t believe it. Lily is here, hovering over me, her hand laying gently on my back, her fingers touching the naked flesh so softly. I can feel her concern, but I don’t deserve it. I struck her.

“Lily, please back away. I don’t want to hurt you.” I pant out, grabbing the toilet bowl harder with both arms as another wave of nausea hits me.

“I know.”

Two little words. Two little words from her mouth to my ears rips my insides apart. Years worth of crimes, abuse, and kills flash under my closed eyelids. All the faces of the people I’ve tortured and dumped in my pit are all coming back to stare at me, climbing from the depths where I put them, uncovering the root cause of my psychosis.

I can see him, in the dark, just a pile of rotted bones and fabric. Everything has either been eaten away by decomposition or the creepy crawlies that live in the soil. His sinister grin in his lips is gone with the flesh, but the skull still exists, the mouth that spewed the hatred, the hands that broke the bones and spirits of my mother and me, they’re all still down there. They haunt me, like a poltergeist, making me do the things I do, making me hurt people more than love them.

“What have I become?” I ask the foamy yellow water in the toilet. “How did I get here?”

“You were crying in your sleep.” Lily says, braving the proximity near me to kneel at my side. “What did he do to you? Your father.”

“More than I could ever tell you in a lifetime.” I struggle to say, choking back the acid that threatens to come from my mouth and nose. “And nothing that someone so pure as you needs to hear.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll turn you into me.”

“What if part of me already is like you?” She asks, rubbing m back, then reaching up and stroking my hair, pulling the spikey ends through her fingers slowly, scratching my scalp with each pass of her fingernails.

“I doubt that. You’re…you. And you’re not even you anymore. I see it. Being here has changed you, and not for the better.”

“It has.”

“The passcode to the alarm system is 030949.”

“Why do I need that?”

Leaning away from the toilet and looking up at her through tear-stained eyes, I see what I’m doing to her. The cuts from the mirror on her cheek, the fresh blood from striking her in bed, and the sore spots on her ankles from her shackles. I’ve killed the flower by plucking her from the garden.

“Run.”