12 Steps to Misery

The pain, it hurts. The sting of the hand wiping across my face burns. The lashes on my back are unhealthily healing. The scrapes cover my body but uncover my father’s secret. I can’t tell anyone, but it’s getting worse. The things he does to me while drunkenly unaware are unbelievable to me. The pain he causes me is uncontrollable. Every time he reaches for just one more beer, I inch closer to my bedroom, closer to safety, closer to where I can pretend I am sleeping so I don’t feel the pain or hear myself shrieking. Even as I lay in my bed, I’m terrified. I can hear each slow step up the stairs. Each slurred word and every pound of his fist against his hand. He wants to beat me. He wants to hurt me. I know it. He doesn’t love me, he never will. He will keep beating me until my life comes to an end.
         He’s on the third step. Only nine left. He’s coming for me. Coming to hurt me, beat me, scold me for just being a kid. How can I be normal when I know as soon as my dad gets home from work, sits on the couch and drink I will be slaughtered? Slaughtered like a spring pig. Slaughtered in my own house, my own bedroom.
         Sometimes I think he knows what he is doing, that he isn’t drunk, only acting. Sometimes I wish he would just tell me he was sorry, give me a hug or a kiss or even acknowledge me. Does he even remember what he did to me the night before or is he too hung-over to care?
         The sixth step, he is halfway here. Halfway to torturing his own daughter, halfway to going insane, going crazy and letting his anger out on my frail thirteen year old body. I am the victim in this situation. I lie in bed and close me eyes and hope for the best. Ten, eleven, he stops at the top step. He doesn’t come any farther just punches his hand against the other over and over again. Intimidating me. It seems like forever until he takes another step farther. Another step toward my torture chamber, another step toward me.
         The room is shrinking around me. The steps are getting closer, and closer. Thwack, Thwack…the sound of his pounding fists are getting louder. The next thwack doesn’t come. Instead, I hear the door creak and a foot slip into the crack of the door. Next I see a face, his face. My father’s drunken body and sunken face. I shut my eyes tight. Not letting even a slit of light come through. He was coming. “Get up” was all I heard before I felt it.
         At first I didn’t know where it had come. I didn’t know that my father had been close enough to place his hands on me. The slap of his unaware hand stung my face but deprived me of all my dignity, all my hope that this would just end soon. This was all I was able to think about before the next smack came. He thrusted me from my bed and wrapped his arm tightly around my neck, constricting my airway. My stomach felt like it was imploding, only because it couldn’t explode because of the tight grasp of my fathers other hand. My oxygen supply enveloped to a minimum. “Dad,” I choked out, knowing I would black out if this continued.
I could feel the energy he put into each lash onto my back and my face. I could hear the shrill scream of my own voice filling the otherwise silent air. That’s when I felt no more.
The pain, yeah it hurts, but I know every slash brings me closer to the end. Closer to the time when he will leave me. He throws me aside and leaves as slowly as he came, glaring back at me. I gasp for air and collapse onto the ground.
This wasn’t a father. This man that gave me my life wasn’t the same. Surely, the man that cared enough to put me into this world wasn’t this awful, hurtful person. It had to be someone nice and caring. Life isn’t even remotely fair for me, not like the other childrens. They complain if their dad won’t let them go to the mall with their friends, I think to myself, what if your father beat you for pestering him to let you go? People don’t know how I feel, or what goes on. I’ll keep it to myself until I find the one person I trust, the one person who will understand. Until then, I lie here scared out of my wits, waiting for the beating to come again.