1
Nicki
I could tastethe blood in my mouth. Coppery. Salty. A grunt escaped me as the belt bit in along my back, the end slapping around my side and along the softer flesh under my arm. The sting made my eyes water and I blinked back tears.
“Count, goddamn it,” his voice growled at me in the darkness.
I tightened my grip on the rope that held my arms suspended in the barn, refusing to give the bastard the pleasure of seeing me cry.
“One,” I said, my voice harsh even to my own ears.
The belt whistled through the air and came down again, striking lower this time along much older scars. Not as much pain there, not after hundreds of other beatings like this one.
“Two,” I continued, taking a breath between strikes. Again, he lashed out, the leather whistling as he struck me again and again.
“Three.”
“Five.”
“Fifteen.”
Sometime after twenty-five, I lost count. Blow after blow rained down, and when my knees finally gave out, I hung with all my weight on my arms, too lost in the pain to care.
I heard him seething in the darkness. The man who should have protected me from pain and anguish. The man who took his anger and frustration with the world out on my flesh and blood. The man who hated every breath I took. The man who was my father.
When I opened my eyes again, he was gone. The only evidence he’d ever been there were the crumbled blue nitrile gloves he wore whenever he beat me. God knew, he didn’t want to take the chance of getting my blood on him. He hadn’t touched me skin to skin since the day we’d received my diagnosis. I lay crumpled in the dirt of the old wooden barn staring at the blood smeared gloves on the floor, just inches from my face. Just like all the other times this had happened.
I wasn’t even sure what had set him off this time. It could have been a word, a look. Hell, it could have just been a memory. I used to try and figure out what I’d done to deserve all the pain he’d dished out over the years. I tried to be a good man, a good son, but nothing I did was ever good enough.
It took me years to realize the pain he inflicted wasn’t about me, really. It wasn’t the things I said, or things I did, or the way I looked. It was abouthim. His pain. His loss. He’d made it clear by the scars on my body that he was the one who was important. After all, he’d lost a wifeanda son. It didn’t matter that I was still breathing, that I walked, and talked, and flinched at his slightest move. I was already dead to him.
The sole reason for my continued existence was to be a weapon,theweapon. The only one that he that could use to wound my mother daily.
Every bruise he inflicted on me, every drop of blood I shed, was damage hewasn’tinflicting on my mother. So instead of fighting back, I took the hit. Instead of running away, I gripped the rope that held my arms aloft. I was a willing victim in the nightmare that had become my world because it was the bargain I’d struck to keep my mother alive.
I blinked as a stinging drop of sweat dripped into my eye. A muscle in my back began spasming, but I just shut my eyes and tried to breathe through the pain. I wanted to move, to try and find a position that would ease my discomfort, but I knew I’d pass out again if I tried to get up. For the longest time I just lay there, the sharp agony in my back and legs making my eyes water, watching the setting sun throwing soft beams of light through the slats of the wooden walls and along the dirt floor. Motes of dust swam in the sunlight like lazy fireflies.
Time passed and darkness eventually slithered into the barn, the oppressive heat of the day giving way to the chill of the evening. After a time, I felt strong enough to get to my knees. I knew I had to get up, to get clean. If even one of the cuts on my back and legs got infected, I could die from it. My father sure as shit wouldn’t take me to a doctor to get antibiotics, and it was too soon for me to beg any more from Dr. Dunwoody, our next-door neighbor.
Once I got to my knees, I was able to get a grip on the sturdy workbench that hugged the side of the barn and drag myself to my feet. I grabbed the shirt I’d been wearing before the beating and crumpled it up in my hands. I had to be careful not to get any blood on it. A stain on a wearable shirt would be just another reason for a future beating, and I didn’t think I could handle two so close together.
“Don’t rile him up. Get to your room. Get a shower. Get some sleep.” It was what my mother had told me, the first night he’d struck either of us. It had become a mantra I repeated nightly as I dragged myself, step by step across the yard and into the house.
As I entered through the back door, I stopped for a moment, listening. I could hear the TV on in his bedroom, then heard the hiss and clink as he opened another bottle of beer. Good. If he was drinking, he was probably done for the night. He’d never take the chance of drinking and driving. He was a sheriff after all. He had appearances to maintain, and a DUI just wouldn’t do.
I started across the linoleum floor of the kitchen to the stairs that led to the second story, my bedroom, and relative safety. My bare foot came down on a shard of glass from the beer bottle he’d thrown at me earlier. That’s what had started everything tonight… his beer hadn’t been cold enough. I couldn’t repress a gasp as the unexpected pain lanced through my foot.Fuckthat hurt.
“Dominic!” he roared from his room. Shit.
“Yes,sir,” I said through gritted teeth, hoping like hell he was done.
“Get your ass in here,” he yelled. Dammit.
As I limped toward his room, I felt something wet and sticky on my back and saw the smear of blood on the kitchen tile. My fingers brushed along my side and I winced as they came away bloody. I rubbed my hands frantically on my jeans, hoping that the dark color would disguise the stain. My father hated the sight of my blood. Hated and loved it in equal measure, it seemed.
I walked to the open door of his room and stared at him, keeping to shadows as much as I could. He sat on the mattress, his feet propped up in front of him, the remote on top of the dingy bedspread. His beer sat on the table next to him, right next to his badge and his gun.
My father, Willis Terhune, was the Sheriff of Monroe County, Florida. Our family had moved here from Ohio when I was just sixteen so that we would be closer to the medical specialists in Tampa. I’d suffered from a mysterious chronic immune system disease my whole life that the doctors in Ohio couldn’t identify.
