FATHER

hi guys, so this is the first in a series of related short stories I’m going to be posting. there are 3 of them and they are titled Father, Husband and Son. So read, I hope you enjoy it and I’ll post the next one soon ☺️☺️💕

Father. Daddy. My agape love.

There are things about me you will never understand…I too don’t understand them.

There are places in my soul I will never go…all who wander are lost

There are parts of myself i will never go searching for…my father fucked them into submission from the time i turned seven.

My earliest memory used to be my happiest one. I was four. I remember garlands of Christmas laurel wrapped around staircase banisters. I remember the smell of pancakes in the air. The sound of my mother’s laughter, slightly shrill. The feel of rough carpet beneath my feet as I dragged them sleepily into the kitchen. A 50 megawatt smile on his face, the man I rarely saw and barely knew but was told was my father, as he watched me lick the chocolate syrup off my plastic Barbie plate. Fragments of memory, distorted and anamorphic, depicting scenes of the life I once had, the life I might have had….

Did you know, the number seven is a significant one in the bible. In the book of Revelations alone, there are seven churches, seven angels to the seven churches, seven thunders, seven trumpet plagues, seven seals, and seven last plagues. Seven sevens. The number seven is also a significant one in my life. I was seven the first time the man I called “daddy” but whom I could not remember ever seeing at even one of my birthday parties, snuck into my room and held me down firmly, moist hand between my underdeveloped thighs, his eyes closed in ecstasy as I swallowed back screams laced with my father’s cum.

For years, I thought I was the problem. From the ages of seven to seventeen, the years when I shared my father with my mother, and my mother shared with me her fears that my father was having an affair. (Is it an affair if it happens in your daughter’s pink walled bedroom?) The years when my body underwent the fundamental changes of puberty, child to teen to youth, but my mind remained stagnant, traumatized child to traumatized teen to traumatized youth and my soul took on a reverse image of what it was meant to be, confused child to distressed teen to outraged youth. Those years, I truly thought it was my fault that my nearly always absent father enjoyed fucking little girls.

Do you think you know pain? No? Well listen to me.

Pain is watching the anguished screams of your mother stain the light blue walls of the house you took your first steps in, creating demonic shadows in a home with no light. It is in feeling her tears choke you, much in the same way your father enjoys doing on the nights his clothes are strewn across your bedroom floor and your legs are tangled between his. It is in the shame you feel when eyes that have always looked upon you with love, a distant kind of love, but love nonetheless, turn in your direction and you see the word ‘whore’ burning within steely depths. You do not know that you are capable of murderous hate at such a tender age until you turn your back on your mother, fashioning a hangman’s noose out of the sheets of her marital bed. You hear a metallic screech against tiled floors and walk out of your room, just in time to see your mother drag the kitchen stool into her bedroom. She climbs onto the stool with sheets tied tightly together and strings a part onto the ceiling fan….Idly, you wonder if they will hold her weight. You appreciate the symbolism, but really it is just impractical. There is a fly buzzing beside you. You reach to swat it and almost miss the last words she will ever say to you. She speaks in Yoruba but you translate it to English. “Enjoy him now, you took my husband from me all these years. May your own home be as wrecked as you have made mine.”

Hmm…A curse. Your mother’s last words to you are a curse. Not for the first time, you feel a little piece of your heart chip away. You watch as she places the noose around her neck and just as she is about to step off the stool, you walk calmly back to your room, tears in your soul but ice in your heart.

This is my story. This is pain.

I haven’t cried in ten years. Not since the first few weeks that I felt my father’s hands snake up my baby pink nightgown. I sit in the first row of chairs on the grassy field, eyes straight ahead, never straying from the coffin, ears perked, listening to the minister speak about my mother and what a blessing she was. He, the man whose body I know better than I know my own, the man I call Father, glances at me out of the corner of his eye. He never looks me full in the face. Why?…The harsh glare of the sun distracts me. I shield my eyes and my mind drifts away again. I think back to two days ago when my father timidly walked into my room, perching awkwardly on the edge of my bed. I don’t know why he looked so awkward, the bastard’s spent nearly as much time there as I have. Thinking back though, it was probably because of what he’d been about to ask me. I’ve always been a good writer. Words bring me peace. But I couldn’t look my father in the face the day he came to sit on the bed he’d regularly raped me on and asked me to write a eulogy for the woman who’d killed herself because her daughter was her husband’s mistress. I tried. I really did. But my letters were hieroglyphs of heavenly fire written on ancient papyrus scroll. The words written on my heart blazed when I tried to put them down.

My head aches. Everything aches. He comes into my room at 2:16am on a Sunday and I feel my lungs begin to constrict. I cannot breathe. He whispers empty promises against my ear in a voice that reminds me of a host of angels singing praises to Lucifer. He says this will be the last time. They are beautiful words coming from a man with an ugly soul. I watch as he slips his trousers down and my dress up and I feel him push himself into me. Again. And again. And yet again. He curses, pulls out and spits on his cock before painfully thrusting once more. His eyes are tightly shut throughout, I don’t think the poor man can bear to look at me as he spills his seed into me, an unfortunate product of his seed.