“I would sit and watch, fascinated by their animation, their joy at playing together or creating a picture their parents would gush about, hugging them when coming to collect them. What was it they felt that compelled them to want to hug, touch, care that much?”
“Did your mother not show you affection?”
“My mother never showed affection unless she was having a clean spell. She would stop dosing herself up on drugs and decide she wanted to play mommy and house. She would clean, and prepare sit down dinners, and act interested in us. She would turn up on time to collect me from school but whether she was the cracked up junkie or the Mother Teresa version of herself it made no difference to how I felt about her. I always felt indifference, and as I got older, disgust. Even at such a young age my demons were dark and bitter. Blake, my older brother, would eat that shit up. He craved affection from her and it didn’t make sense to me. He loved it when she took the time to prepare a meal for us, but me? I wanted to use my dinner knife to put her out of her misery. She was a pathetic excuse for a human being and those changes in her only ever lasted until the weekend when my Dad brought home his mediocre wages and they would fuck and get high.
“I remember the first time I saw them fucking. They were arguing at first and the raised voices woke me. I hoped one would finally choke the other but when I made it to the living room he was tearing at her skirt, pushing it up her thighs. He punched her in the face. The contact made a cracking sound and the look of pain on her face and the crimson bubble of blood that rose from her lip intrigued me.”
I stop talking to assess her reactions to my life story. She leans over to a side table next to her chair and pours water into a glass from a jug, then offers me some. Holding up my hand to refuse, I wait while she takes a sip.
“Please carry on. What happened after he struck her?” she asks.
“He fucked her.” I accentuate the word fuck, causing her eyes to clash with mine before she jots something down, making me smirk.
I continue, “Her cries from the pain of his fist became moans and screams of pleasure. She was a whore and he repulsed me for being so driven by lustful need. He was pathetic, his thin hips bashed at her as he screamed explicit words that got her more turned on. He should have hit her again and again until she became silent.”
“Did you want him to kill her?”
“I wanted them to kill each other while I watched.” I raise a brow, challenging her to question my sanity.
“I read in your file that your father isn’t Blake’s biological father, and that there are other siblings on both sides. Who lived in your household?”
“Blake has siblings on his father’s side but we didn’t know of them when we were young. It was just Blake and I, plus our parents, if you can call them that.”
“There were no other children that you know of on your father’s side?” she asks with a cocked brow.
“No,” I grind out. The stupid bitch
“What about pets? Did you have any pets?”
“We had a puppy, sort of. It was Blake’s. He found it while walking me home from school one day. He was twelve and I was six, and this car hit the dog right in front of us and then drove off. Blake was crazy angry and chased the car for a good stretch of road before realizing it was pointless. I didn’t understand his rage. It was just a useless animal, but he picked that thing up. Its leg looked all wrong; broken and twisted. When we got it home he asked my Dad to take him to a vet. Dad laughed and told him they would just kill it because it’s a stray. Blake kept it in our room but it cried all night in pain. I was sick of the noise so I snuck it outside and used Dad’s axe to chop its leg off, thinking that was the source of its pain so if I took it, it would stop whining. The blood was everywhere and the stupid thing was howling real loud.” The noise plays in my head as I re-tell the memory. “I swung again and chopped his head off, dumping the body in a stream that ran along the woods at the back of our house. When Blake woke up the next day, Mom told him the dog must have run away. She cried when she found my blood-soaked clothes but never spoke about it. I didn’t feel anything but pity for such pathetic animals. They can’t even care for themselves. They’re incompetent.”
“Why did your mother cry? Did she know what you did?” Dr. Jenna asks, confused.
I shift in my seat and tap my fingers on the armrest of the chair. I bask in the delight of her eyes snapping to the movement and then she jots down something on her pad.
All these psychiatrists love Mommy issues and want to blame our behavior on the abuse of a parent.