14th Sep 2006
Book Excerpt **Warning** Explicit
It’s been seventeen years since it all came out. Twentyseven since he started. I remember it all, every second of the abuse as if it were yesterday. People think that it all goes away when it stops, but it doesn’t.
Getting through the abuse was the easy part. Going numb was simple. Burying my face in a pillow so I wouldn’t have to watch in the mirror was an act of self preservation, a last ditch effort to protect myself in some way. Unless you count the suicide attempts. I see those as just what they were- frustrated attempts to be heard, to stop the pain that I hid away from the rest of the world.
The day he got out of work release my Mama wasn’t home. I got off the bus and walked in to find him in the kitchen and I felt the familiar taste of vomit in the back of my throat. I knew what was coming, what was about to happen. I ran to my room in the basement and tried in vain to lock the door.
Seconds later I heard his footsteps fall on the creaking wooden stairs. When he opened the door without knocking there was no mistaking his intention. I began to cry and beg him to leave me alone. He told me to shut up before he shut me up. His breath was foul, as if he hadn’t cleaned his dentures in days after eating onions and pastrami. I gagged as he stuck his tongue in my mouth. He bit my bottom lip and my tongue.
His hands were down my shorts and on my breasts. I knew he was going to rape me again, just like all the other times. I was powerless to stop him and it made me ill, more ill than the rape itself. I had no control over my body, over the way I was being used. He pulled my shorts down and started to use his tongue on me. I kicked and screamed, because I hated that more than I hated anything else. He held my thighs apart and later the bruises would appear as cruel reminders of that day. I pulled out a clump of his hair, so forcefully that there were bits of skin attached. I delighted in the minute amount of pain that I’d caused him.
He raped me then. I hated him more than ever because he raped me and didn’t use anything to keep me from getting pregnant. Before he used the same contraceptive foam that he and my mother used. This time he didn’t and he knew what he was doing. I didn’t think it was possible to be more terrified than I was before, but I was. For weeks I worried that my period wouldn’t come.
He finished and pulled his pants up. He sneered at me as he made his way across the room to the door. “I told you I would make you pay for telling. Now do you understand the control I have over your mother? I told you she wouldn’t believe you.” And with that he walked out leaving me to lay there in a puddle of my own vomit and his semen.
Later that night I told my mother what had happened. He convinced her that I was lying, that I was pissed that he’d made me do chores after school. No matter how I cried, she believed him. A week later I was sent to boarding school without warning. A Walmart shopping trip for basic clothes and a weekly allowance of twenty dollars to do my laundry and buy things like soap and detergent were all he would allow me to have. I was hurt and devastated but at long last, I was free.
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