A Victor’s Psalm (chapter 1)
foreword and chapter one: Horror Show
(Please note: Chapter One is heavy on depictions of child sexual abuse. People sensitive to triggering may want to avoid it. The other chapters aren’t entirely risk free, but are more oriented to healing and spirituality. ~ww)
ISBN 0–9652053–0–4
Foreword Chapter 1: Horror Show Chapter 2: Out of Ashes Chapter 3: Primal Light Chapter 4: Awe Mixed Up (Those still experiencing symptoms from their own abuse, may wish to hold off reading Chapter 1 until another time.)
FOREWORD
I am supposed to be doing something. It has to do with speaking truth. The intersection between Truth and my truth cannot be measured in square inches, statistical accuracy or opinion polls. Sometimes I get glimmerings from those who weep to hear or fear to weep; the latter resent the yanking of bubble gum music from out their ears. Sorry, folks. You can always plug them back.
My Rip VanWrinkle soul has only just woken up, decades of long lost dream dream tales to tell, stories to whiten hair, harrow hearts, fire hope into night skies like Roman candle comets; narratives to nauseate, inspire projectile vomit. I am the story teller. Sit by my fire. Or not; You do not have to listen… still, mercy on me please. I must tell my tales.
So strange to fall asleep a child too doomed to weep, to wake next to my wife in our safe bed, shared by our purring cat in our warm room, adjacent to our daughter’s and our son’s. Ours, yes, ours for now. My mother dead. Two sisters lost. A kinky beard of salt and cayenne pepper, dried tears rime on warlike words of fire.
I write these words having laid my torn back on a hard ice pack meant for cans of tonic. A container also, I can dream of quenching thirst only if I let my own fill me with holy flame. So ironic… The grail you drink from is the same as mine. I’m not entirely sure what that line means… maybe nothing, but I doubt it.
I am the storyteller. I am supposed to be doing something. It has to do with speaking truth.
Chapter 1: HORROR SHOW
KILLER DREAM
After three weeks in tropical heat a corpse at the bottom of a cistern doesn’t leave many clues if no bone is broken. Rotten luck. That was our mother…that Thanksgiving as I lifted the turkey up with its loose bones popping through the skin, I kind of lost my thankfulness.
Since then I’ve written a few letters with no way of knowing the address, from this side of existence anyway. I don’t really know what she would think of my newly shared childhood, of her second husband molesting my sister and me. She never was much when it came to facing her mistakes, particularly when it meant giving up the fairytale endings
she hungered for so much she never missed a payment on that island lot where she pictured herself relaxing in her custom self-designed home with glass ball buoys, nets, shells and her paintings hanging over her typewriter where she would write articles for a receptive grateful National Geographic; her children would drop by from time to time having forgotten that she signed over
custody without even telling them she was leaving. They would have been dead weight slowing her manhunt of the lying drunken fleet-footed child-molesting sweet-talking great effing Peterphilic Pan who raped her kids while she covered her eyes with a copy of Wuthering Heights. When she finally realized her Heathcliff
was irretrievable, she shifted her sights to Bahamian bliss clutching tighter than a crab, certainly not about to give up her claws. She taught school waited table took boarders sold World Book raised a daughter (it was the other way around) traveled Europe went on welfare but never missed a payment
on that dream house on a dream island in a dream world. When Nana died she got some cash, retired and left saying we’d be over to visit her in Paradise, where she had some drinks, went home to find the plumbing didn’t work in Paradise, so went back out to check the cistern, lifted the cover, fell right in, died alone in the dark, and we didn’t know about it until her corpse had time to rot.
You know, she had every right to dream those dreams, try to find a life where no man or woman would oppress or betray or abandon her, no children would resent her, throw her mistakes in her face like acid; I wish somehow we hadn’t been such disappointments, hadn’t felt so oppressed or betrayed or abandoned because of her past, which she couldn’t help anymore than we could.
We told each other the fall must have been so great, the water so shallow, her so fragile, that she died instantly…maybe so, or maybe that’s as close as we can get to a fairytale ending where Mom’s spirit, beyond all shame or blame, is typing her story for us this time, so we can finally know
her failing us, our failing her, was just how it was, beyond our control. Now we know from her pain and ours to make those payments no matter what, no matter what to make those payments, on the loves in our lives right now, in this place, in this time, in this world, where we bring ourselves to this life as payment received and good, with no return or guarantee needed,
no matter what.
FATHER, SON
Black door. Typewriter clacks. In the hall the boy floats with sunlit motes, unable to open.
Sister waits down below, blue blanket spread under a naked bulb, in the cellar. Naked.
Small boy stares at the knob he dares not turn; hungry witch, devouring mouth would chew him up, slowly.
Tick tock. Clackety clack. Crystal knob miles away, frozen for years, and years and years. Open.
LATE SHOW RERUN
The late late show comes on again. My legs twitch, toes curl tight. Try to not remember. Breath stops, body jitters, dances to a tune I never called. Hers.
Witching hour, burning claws around my throat, warning. Deep wet mouth glides over me, hungry and hot like that between her legs, steaming.
Grasped, stroked, played as a bow against her strings vibrated to crazed music, strained, untuned, Flesh/soul shaken apart so far, so I hush, rigid as death.
Then small, I got smaller. Now I’m big, strong, graybeard. So what? Legs twitch, toes curl, breath stops try to not remember, not remember, but I do, I do, and I tell.
HOLDING BREATH
I’ve been suffocating all my life from my body’s recall of breath being rammed right out of it over and over, stepfather’s hard hot heaviness and laughter smashing me into sister’s spread legged writhing below. Like a worm under a black jack boot, consciousness was utterly crushed out.
Sometime later I’d awake in pain and darkness, sticky with spit, tears, cum, blood and vaginal secretions. At five years old I knew the truth of what had happened. I’d been killed and I was dead. My mistake was thinking I’d be buried, no such mercy. Murdered without end, amen.
After a few years it did stop, at least outside, to vanish inside like a nightmare living deep within the unseen shadows of my soul. I hated my body, worshipped my genitals, not knowing why I was so odd, the altered boy of a pervert’s evil mass, receptacle of rape, unholy damned communion.
After a few decades, I started to breathe again.
EUPHEMISM
Some educated well respected child molesting geek coined it “pedophilia” as though coercion and rape of children were some elevated polysyllabic form of love, and the name stuck like semen on a child’s face.
The boy is there on the stained blue blanket waiting for the question that never comes, so ask him how a child knows the difference between his own blood and his stepfather’s cum, after they’ve gone upstairs, turning off the cellar light. He won’t say
but he knows one clots while the other liquefies to dry on his skin. He won’t say on pain of death from two gods, one a combat-trained marine, honorably discharged, the other a wicked witch
ravenous for his flesh, who will eat him if he ever tells on sister. You won’t ask? Whoa, so sorry, I forgot, such things don’t happen to nice upper class white
pampered families with Cleaver morals, Puritan ethics, no sirree, not in those clean homes away from the eyes of DCF social workers or SPCC consciousness because
such evil is confined to slums, po’ white trash or people of color with horrible grammar, and besides girls are victims, never the perps, though if it happened the boy should thank her.
He won’t answer or even make a sound, he’s far, far away where nothing hurts. It’s all in his mind, he’s o.k., no need to do anything for those girls and boys who imagine they are in pain.
They smile, they play, maybe a little spacey, too compliant or oppositional, apathetic or driven, promiscuous or celibate, one extreme or other. They’ll pass, they’ll pass, they’ll
go outside to pose for pictures with their respectable families. Those kids should all get Oscars. There is not enough gold, though, in the whole world.
So if you are going to ask… if you really want to know… prepare yourself. Prepare for action; the answer is that nothing less will do.
HUNTER
Black wrapped, corpse white secrets shudder, turn their heads, slow, lips guilty with child blood. Shiver. Know. I’m coming home.
Feel the changes in this house! Curtains rip and windows open! Flee the air, the light, my steps! Flee the bright mirror I bear!
You dread that truth more than the sun, burst through the door, as bats from cave, to your last deaths. Your mildew skin blackens, shrivels, falls off stark bone.
In dark folds and moldering bones a newborn wails, poor pink thing! I lift him, show him to the sun, cradle him, soothe him, bring him home.
Chapter Two: Out of Ashes (link to chapter)
………………………….. Dear readers who have stuck with me this far: the remainder of the book is more uplifting. ~ WW, April, 2021