11

1980

My father saw me off to school or he would drive me to school, himself. I remember the way he looked at me right before I got on the bus. I could see a mixture of pride and warning in his eyes. He wanted me to know how much he loved me and he wanted me to know how dumb it would be if I was a bad girl. I read many things in my father's gaze and not all of them were pleasant. He would run his fingers through my auburn hair and send me off for another day at kindergarten.
My grandmother would wave at me from the window of the house as I got on the bus. Sometimes, when my aunt was visiting she would stand there beside my grandmother and wave as well..if she wasn't fussing with my clothes as I got on the bus. Mother was rarely around in the morning because she worked at the factory in Holly Springs. She worked for Sunbeam for years and years of her life.

 My mother never drove because she was afraid of cars. I was told that it was because she had almost ran off a bridge once while learning to drive. Everywhere that mother wanted to go, my father or a neighbor had to take her. She could not read either and relied on us to read things for her. Even the grocery papers made my mother frustrated and she would sit and wait for someone to walk by and read to her. Sometimes if my grandmother wasn't busy, she would read to my mother. They became very close.

My father, as most other men, was an avid sports fan. His favorite sport was basketball. He would attend all the games that the Ashland team would play. He loved to take me with me...I figure he wanted me to love the game as well and to also show off his daughter to his friends. When George realized that basketball season was coming he would always come down the little dirt road and ask my father if he could go.  I knew what would happen when he went with us.
 The sexual abuse by my cousin George got worse. George would touch me all the way to the game and back home again. I was confused but I still let it happen. In the dark of my father's truck you could not see when George slipped his hand into my pants. You could not see his hand in my shirt nor could you hear him whispering that I should never tell. I didn't tell....not for a years and many years to come.

As I got used to kindergarten, I started to speak to others. But the only language that we had in common was fleshly pleasure. Of course, this was something that should never have existed but it did. Some children were developing feelings and wondering about things that adults did. Some of the girls on the bus would put their hands in my pants and I would do the same. Death told me that I started this habit. Later on, when my sister brought my neice, who was two years younger than me, to visit; I would show her part of my body and she would do the same to me. We had a special place in my grandmother's room that we would explore ourselves and play doctor. It was behind a big plush chair. As feelings of horrible dread eat away at me, I remember more. I was letting the disease spread which came from George. When he touched me, I would show the girls and my neice just what he did. I was becoming a childhood monster and gaining a form of control that I had never before experienced.
There were many demons....many demons which walked that little dirt road to my house. There was George, the pedaphile. There was Rodney the bully who, on a regular basis would beat me up and take my bicycle, hiding it in the woods. There was the two blonde sisters who came to visit acting as if their shit didn't stink. Telling me that I was strange and ugly then smiling those sickening saccarine smiles before returning back up the road. There were others... There was Cami and her brother. They came every day as George did. Cami was a little girl with waist length thick blonde hair and blue eyes. She always had an evil look on her face, just behind the smile. But I needed Cami.
Cami was a constant source of friendship during the seasons. She would walk down that little dirt road and play with me, she never called me ugly and so she thought I was obligated to be her friend. We played pretend in the woods, my room and behind my grandmother's house. She was always very bossy, not at first, but she always pulled me very gradually into being her pet. I was her make believe patient, her make believe lover and her slave. Once I was Elvis and I had to kiss her over and over, as she was Pricilla. When she wanted me to be the baby, I had to pretend to take a nap. I would lie there for a very long time with the covers pulled to my chin while she played with my dolls. When she was finished she made me get up and clean her mess. I was a dutiful slave then...but something crackled inside and flaked away gradually. After a while, a fire began to burn inside. It got hotter and hotter and it burned my skin. When I saw her walking down that dirt road one day, I grabbed a thorny branch on my gandmother's rose bush. I squeezed that branch tighter and tighter. The closer she got to my house, the harder I grasped the branch. As she walked up my driveway, I released the thorny branch. I remembered Cami's face as she looked down at my bloody hand. She really looked shocked.
Mommy made us Kool Aid and cookies. We watched television as Momma fussed over my hand. I was numb for a long time...but I stared at Cami's face. All I could see was the bones beneathe her skin. I hated her.

10

1979-1980

Daddy wanted a son who followed him and done the things that he did. He got that with my older brother; But then he also got a girl who wanted to be a boy and do those
things just as well.
 I was made to love the soft and hard of life, so to speak.  I wanted to hunt and shoot guns, I wanted to build things as my father did. One day daddy let me shoot his 22 pistol, it hurt my ears but I loved
it and was fascinated my the feel of it, the power I held. Although most people know that 22s only hold enough power to piss you off when using them. It was a small
amount of power and but was interesting. I wanted the control I felt through the steel and found it tantalizing. But Somehow I failed miserably. When confronted with monsters that wanted more control than I desired myself, I was both mezmerized and humbled. Again, I was back inside the small body of a female child.
My family was a fragment of a small tribe. Strong in their disfunction. Proud in their secrets. We were sophisticated animals of a sort. It was grueling, our survival.
We made life and we made death simultaneously to sustain, my family and I did so. We were almost self-sufficient in this.

Every year, there was a garden which provided our vegetables and fruits. There was bean,green,tomato,squash,cucumber,corn,onion and various other veggies. There were
melons as well. I remember the work, the toiling all the way to harvest time and how determined my father was to make us work for our food. The dirt, I remember the
smell of fresh damp earth underneath my fingertips. I loved to lay down in the tilled earth and feel it surround me. I did this until my father yelled for me to get
back to work.

 Every year we filled our freezers and bellies with game from the forest behind our house and many other wooded areas near where we lived. We milked cows and goats and
got pork from my aunt's small farm up the little dirt road. We made kraut and butter in churns, we fished lakes and rivers for Catfish, bass and brim. There wasn't much
we could not provide for ourselves. Daddy killed deer, squirrel, rabit, racoon and possum then mother would help clean and prepare the game for our meals and to store
for winter. I remember blood....so much blood and parts of various animals. And for some reason, the white freezer paper sticks in my memories as some reminder of the
pristine compartment for our grisley gift wrappings. And I can remember the freezer...huge and monstrous with various dead animals cut into a creative array of portions
waiting for that fateful day when we would consume them. One day the big freezer came unplugged from the socket and all our meat went to ruin. My father was angry, my
mother cried and the stench was horrible. So we started over.

1980
I started kindergarten at the age of 5 and for some reason also attended through the age of 6. I have a faint memory of things that transpired at the school. I know
that I felt different from the other children, I felt alone...surrounded by a bubble in which I had a small world of my own. I watched the other children play together
and laugh. At nap time I would lie awake and watch two boys practice turning their eyelids inside out. I tried to do the strange trick myself and would only fall asleep
with sore eyes. As I would fall into my nap, I could hear the other kids giggling and talking about the strange girl who couldn't do the things that they did. I heard
them talk about the nasty girl, the ugly girl...the girl who never talked to them.
One day I asked the cafeteria lady what was in the cup she gave me for breakfast and she told me that it was urine. She thought it was funny to tell me that and she
laughed and laughed as I made a horrible face. I ran to the bathroom and puked because what she said made me sick. I never liked her after that. When the staff started
to take all the children to the dentist for a check up, I refused to drink my milk and would not eat the crackers because the cafeteria lady went with us and she smiled
every time our teacher passed out our snacks.

Once, I peed on myself on the school bus. I don't remember why but I remember the laughter and my horror. I realized that I didn't like school very much. Everyday at
recess, I would hide underneath the steps that led outside the trailer our classroom was in. I would play pretend and imagine that I was powerful. Death, he sat there
with me everyday and told secrets about the other children. I laughed and laughed.

9

If I was to say that I remember everything at any given time, then I would be a liar. There are parts of me that crave to remember while other parts beg to forget. I
can understand each sensation of loss and gain filter throughout my body, every day. I reach for reasons for the darkness and the sadness but find so very few floating
on the surface. I dig deeper to find the reasons for my mania and find a mental disorder waiting there for me. A broken thing which churns out putrid bats, spiders and
worms. I cringe at the thought of losing myself inside that convoluting machine.

1980

The fog had shifted a bit allowing in memories so heinous and ugly that I rather forget. But it won't let me, he won't let me forget. Death was hiding behind the trees
in the backyard one day and he introduced himself to me.
I loved to play in the backyard at an old sink that my father used to clean animals that he killed while hunting. I would collect old antique bottles that I found
around my grandmother's house and I would fill them with mixtures of water and mud. I found so many colorful bottles of blue, green and black that were almost in
pristine condition. I oft times stole into the old shed in the backyard and pull out beautiful old liquir bottles and claimed them as well. I would fill them full of
liquid dirt and leaves and label them as my poison bottles. Whenever I was alone I gave poison to my dolls and then watched them die. One by one, I would scold them and
lay them down beneathe the big peacan tree and then I would walk onto the trail and hide there till mom called me for dinner.

I loved this game and he did too. I saw him hiding one day just past the bend in the trail behind the old sink. At first I thought he was Cami's brother but he
disappeared like he was dust evaporating in the sun. My heart was thundering in my chest and wanting to jump out, running ahead of me. But I watched as each and every
particle evaporated; death, my new friend, was gone. But he wouldn't be able to stay away.
the summer

Cami was mean to me. I do not know if she practiced her cruelty or if she just had a sudden urge to torture others. I was her pet and I did whatever she asked of me
because I was scared of what she might do to me. I remember when we played dolls and she had to have what she wanted. I had to dress them in the ways that she wished, I
had to name them as she wanted and I was at her beckoning on everything. I Felt the need at first to obey Cami, wanting so badly to please her and make her like me
more. Her brother was mean to both of us as well, always trying to hold her down and do bad unbrotherly things to her. ONe time he started to touch me but moma came in
the room. I think he was afraid of my mother, she always had some herb or animal part in her hand when she scolded us.

Cami told me that she and her brother would do things that they weren't supposed to and that I should never tell her grandmother about it. She said her brother touched
her privates. Whenever she would start talking, I would drift away and think of death. I wondered if death liked to watch George touching me. I wondered if death was
kind. I didn't know he was death then, but I do know now. I know that death has always been with me since my first breath. I know that when I inhaled, fresh from my
mother's womb, that death captured that breath and recorded who I was.

1980

Daddy loved to tickle me. He would hold me down and count my ribs until I screamed. Me and daddy would lay across his bed and play silly games for hours. He had this
one game he loved to play where he could stick out his tongue and only when I would pull his chin, would he put his tongue back into his mouth. Then If I pulled his
cheek he would stick out his tongue again, but to the side I was pulling. If i pulled the other cheek he would switch his tongue to that side as well. If I pulled his
nose, he would close his eyes. It was a game that made me giggle so hard, my tummy would hurt.
One day, it was different. Daddy was playing his games with me when suddenly he grabbed my tummy a little too low. I think it was an accident but I punched him in his
face. IN return he punched me back. I was only 6 years old.

8

I do not remember exactly in which the events of my early life took place. I can guess somewhat by the nightmares, how things happened to me.
I do, in fact, know that he started touching me when I was around 4 years old. The memory from 4 is scattered and fragmented but it retains significant events that the adult can remember.
The physical feelings that arose within me was not that of a normal child of my age. I felt physical pleasure and arousal at an early age of 4 years old.
The first event that can be remembered was the time that George spent the night with me and my brother Allen. It seemed innocent enough. I do not recall my brother sleeping with us and the foot of my parent's bed but I remembered George smiling and how I begged mom and dad to let us sleep in the floor. I remember lying there next to him but do not remember him touching me at that time, not yet.
One night while everyone was asleep, I used a pair of children's scissors to arouse myself. I noticed how it felt like electricity was passing throught the metal scissors and onto my flesh. I was so very young to feel this sensation. I remember that it felt curiously irritating and good at the same time.
Not long after this incident, George started to touch me. I think he was between the age of 16 and 18 years old.
A breif desription of myself as a child.
I was a cute child, maybe even beautiful. At birth, my hair had been coal black and my eyes almost the same depth. I was pale because of frequent sicknesses. As I grew older my hair lightened into a light auburn hue. My hair grew long and wavy down my back. I had a very cute smile which seemed to light up my face. At times in photographs though, it was obvious that some dark thing was already taking residence.

The store
My dad owned a store that he built from the ground up. I used to love to play around the store build things in the dirt. I remember building frog holes and little dirt houses. I even loved to make mud pies and harden them in the opening in the Coke machines. I played with bugs and spiders and ate many unedible things growing around the store building. I loved to be around my father and he doted on me. I remember his pleasantness at an early age.
There are so many things about the store that I remember. Especially how the customers rarely paid him. My father was always so good to others, sometimes better to them than his family. I know it is mean to say this but it is true. He often let them pay by way of credit and has credit booklets to keep up with it. But, most of the time, they never paid him. We lived on a hill surrounded by cousins and aunts and such and they didn't think that relatives should pay for anything from another relative. I think they just signed the credit booklet to humor my dad.
I remember that me, Allen and George used to play inside the store. You see, George and Allen were friends and I don't think my brother knew that George touched me.