Teaser Tuesday

From the soon-to-be-published book A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own:

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

— Audre Lorde

I had stumbled my way into middle school. Most kids don’t like these years and neither did I. Often, I came home from school and the house held an audible silence. I enjoyed capturing moments of quiet time when people weren’t around. Isolation offered its own form of companionship — the reliable howling of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the night — but I hated being completely alone in that evil house. Secluded me with my fears and anxieties my being was racked with non-complicity to the crimes that were hidden there.

With an inability to deny the disturbance I needed a distraction. Food was a friend I used often, and I knew a bowl of ice cream would do the trick. After piling spoonful after spoonful of frozen treasure into my bowl, I returned to the front room. The window there looked over the field that held the cemetery of the murdered woman. Not remembering details because of the precious work and sting of years of repression, my mind was seeking the truth. Most of the years forgotten memory only returned to me in the form of several aches and pains, but today something different was happening. I kept getting this rugged desire to write on the wall. It was a compulsion that drew me — strange and compelling, it was outside of my mental capacity to decipher. I found a pencil, grabbed a chair, and climbed aboard its unsteady seat. Positioning the pencil on the wall well above me, I began to draw large shaky letters about a foot tall. First, I scratched a D, then forged an E, then continued with the letters A T H.

When the last letter had been written, a new impulse arose in me. I went to the kitchen and grabbed this old knife with a heavy wooden handle. Using the old blade as a nail and Mom’s meat cleaver as my hammer, I drove the knife into the wall right after the last letter: an ominous exclamation. I sat and stared at the emblematic graffiti. If no one was going to acknowledge my pain and anguish, I was going to make them see.

. . . to be continued . . .

Originally published at http://prisonerbynocrimeofmyown.com on October 11, 2022.