No Contest.
When she found the pills,
she asked why I wasn’t a virgin
and I described in detail
how a thirteen-year-old penis
could tear a little body of seven years.
I told her what words were required
to cast the spell so that mommies
and daddies would never know.
She understood then why
I cried when she obediently followed
my father to the Village Inn for beers
and facades of happy married life—
why, when they returned, Dad,
drunk and in a fighting mood
ready to purge the booze
by exercising his fists on wife and child,
would find me still crying.
I reminded her that she had told me,
If you’d behave, he might not…
and that it made the words that kept her
from knowing very simple and believable.
I wanted retribution, wanted recompense
for the years I’d held it all in,
and though her response was predictable,
that made it no less morbid.
I don’t think we should tell your father.
So, years later, was it surprising
that, while she related the latest grapevine
story of the boy who committed suicide
and I said to her, They beat him,
she said,
Yes, but a child, who could ever do that…
I reminded her once again,
and she reminisced, told me
as though I were a stranger,
as though I wasn’t part of her history,
didn’t exist for her,
of how my father
had blackened her eyes?
They’ll blame it on you.
©Sugah (jlk)