I tried to push myself off the floor but collapsed. He approached me, and the tip of his shoe crashed into my ribs, stealing my breath. I sounded like some old man who’d smoked too much, trying to gasp a breath in.
“I said get up!” Every word accompanied a kick.
“P-please… I can’t…”
He walked to the door and gawked at me for a while. “I didn’t think you would be like this the first time. This was supposed to be special!” He’d gone from whispering compliments in my ear, from “helping me through it,” teaching me to be a monster’s pet, to screaming and shaming me.
I wasn’t surprised.
“Fine, stay here. See if I care.” He slammed the door shut, but it was as if he’d never left.
His words haunted me, replacing my voices, repeating themselves over and over in my mind until I didn’t know if he’d come and said them in my ear again or not. His voice was constantly there, tormenting me.
That’s it, my beautiful boy. You’re so strong. So good. You can take me.
Don’t cry.
Just do as I say.
Open up for me.
The room only got colder, becoming a freezing hell. My teeth chattered and my body violently trembled, even while sleeping. I knew he was “visiting” me once a day. Despite the revulsion I felt toward him and what he did to me, his skin became my only source of heat.
He thought I was being defiant when I cried every tear drop out of my body, fought him, and wailed for Mum.
“I’ll know you’ll be ready to be my prince when you cry for me and not for her,” he said. But I couldn’t help it. At first, he’d tried to bribe me with cake, but it reminded me of Mum’s wedding, so I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Then he’d bring me champagne or whiskey. He’d force me to drink it before the act. Eventually, I learned to fake sipping it, then throw it away. Every time he visited, he promised things would change if I behaved and gave myself to him. At the end of the act, he’d ask me if there was anything I wanted. It was so hard for me to not ask him for a blanket, light, or a book. I didn’t want to establish myself even more as his cheap whore than I already was.
I only existed to be used by him—nothing else. It was so confusing how he tortured me, planting his thoughts in my mind while forcing himself on me until I couldn’t take it anymore. Until I would come so close to losing the last crumbs of my sanity, screaming and wailing then falter and beg him to stop. In the meantime, he’d muse that he loved me, that we were meant to be together and how one day I’d be truly his one and only beautiful boy, his little prince. At first, I knew it was him manipulating me, but somehow, I lost track of what was real versus fake, right versus wrong. The chaos ate at my mind turning it into a place as mad and dark as the room.
No solid thoughts stood out. The only thing that solidified was my shame, self disgust, and my need to die.
Words clashed into each other and lost meaning. The images in my mind constantly attacked and stabbed me. Even my voices stopped condemning me for Mum’s death. They no longer formed words, just random sounds.
To erase them from my mind, if only just for a few minutes, I had to scream.
The letter of the day is S.Sis for siren.
Iwassocloseto dying when I first heard her voice. My lungs were too heavy. Each breath carried pounds of frigid agony. My throat was closing, less and less oxygen was coming into my brain. The chills ran through every muscle of my body. I knew this time, without a doubt, he wouldn’t get me back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to drink water, eat, or even go to the bathroom. This was it. The force of life within me was thinning. I just had to wait for death’s mercy.
Her humming broke my chaotic senseless thoughts which didn't even last long enough to make even the briefest of memories. The gentle notes demanded my attention. They refused to allow me to keep drowning in the silent darkness and pushed away the hell in my mind to the background. My firstsolid thought finally formed.
A memory of her sprung in my mind. We were lyng down on the field of grass under the magnolia tree, our favorite spot.
“What did you do this weekend?” I asked her.
“Daddy took us to the beach. I wish we could have met there, both our families.”
“What would we have done?”
“Well, it was sunny and hot so we would have built a sand castle to model our future home,” she replied.
Her fantasy brought out my smile. “What else?”
“We would have run deep into the water and floated with our faces looking down at the fish and corals, while holding hands, let the waves rock us deeper into the ocean until we couldn’t watch the shore or hear our parents and swim deep down together so we could swim with dolphins, and manta rays—”
“Would there be whales down there?”
“Yes! Gigantic humpback whales. And one of them would open their mouth and we’d accidently slip into his mouth," she said it with such excitement.
