A Season in Hell XI
3:31. It is Sunday and I still know my date of birth: 7/3/55. And the D.O.D? Tomorrow, a month, a decade away? My shadow is giving off black reflections and my words are just black reflections. Create scenes, one friend advised. Scene I. Being Choked to Death. Scene II. The Body Bag, nails driven into the back of my head the way Mother rammed the bat into my head.
I wish I had an hourglass, could watch time slip away the way I want to slip away. Quietly slip away, just go from the material world, the corporeal world of my mortally wounded body into the spirit world. Maybe I would make a better spirit than mother, than wife. Doctor Susan says, “It’s amazing you survived” when I tell her the memories of Father putting things in and out of the holes in my body, especially the stink hole. Mother brandishing the bat, using her fists. Right now I feel her jamming her knuckles into my tightly closed eyes. Why, why did I survive? Why, why, why?
Susan says, to write and I have written, every day I do. Five books and the only one I care about is My Life as a Doll, that hell tale of my mother’s violence written before I remembered Father’s. It’s a horror story. So why tell it? Who wants to read the nightmares, see the bad film?
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