I don’t get paid much either, not when we don’t live in a good part of the city. Henry Miller even spends those scraps on finding his next fix. Asdoes my mother. I remember her caring about me, but it’s all blurred and hazy memories. Probably something I conjured up to soothe myself.
Elizabeth Miller is no different now. She may not hit me, but she doesn’t stop him either. Just stands there and watches him beat the crap out of me until he’s passed out or gets what he wants.
I hate her more.
“Don’t just stand there and gawk at me. Get to work,” he barks, his tone making me jump.
Without another word, I drop the bag and turn to wash the dishes. He swoops up my bag without wasting another second and empties it right on the floor.
With wide eyes, I go back to stop him. “What are yo—”
He silences any protests with a smack of the back of his hand right across my face. The shock registers first and then the pain, my head whipping to the side with the force.
The man doesn’t hold back.
“How many times do I have to tell you to pay me for the roof you have over your head?” he sneers, bending down to pick up the thirty dollars and some coins that fell out.
I look at him with all the disgust and hate I feel. Let him see how much I abhor him for everything he is.
“Huh? Tell me,” he demands, getting in my face.
I don’t answer, knowing that it grates his nerves. Mother barges into the kitchen, her dark hair in a disarray. The commotion most likely woke her up.
He swishes his head back to look at her, as do I. She has bones protruding out of her body, eyes dead, just like the man in front of me. Marks of all the needles she stuck in herself.
His face turns red when I don’t let him intimidate me in front of her. He reaches past his boiling point and strikes me in the ribs again. Pain at yesterday’s bruise flares unrelentingly.
When I still don’t let a sound out of my mouth, he becomes unrelenting too, pushing me down on the floor and hitting me with whichever limb of his he can. Unsurprisingly, his belt joins too.
In the heat, he picks up a broken glass bottle and throws it at me, my eyes scrunching in pain at the cut along my neck. My hand instantly covers it, and the warm blood slides between my fingers as it seeps down my clothes.
I don’t know how many lashes he gives me after that, or how long I grunt and whimper in pain on the ground with tears streaming down my face as I cover my head with my hands, my eyes trained on the woman who wouldn’t do a damn thing to stop him, to protect herson.
Yes, I break too. There’s only so much of his torture I can handle.
Once he’s done spending what’s left of his energy on beating me, he stumbles away, taking away the money I sacrificed my night’s sleep to earn.
Taking a deep breath, I stagger back up, leaning my broken body on the kitchen counter. Mother walks closer to me, and for a second, my breath hitches, wondering if she’ll show the tiniest bit of remorse for being unable to defend her son from the monster she married as her fingers feather over my bleeding split lip.
I beg her to apologize. To say she cares for me,lovesme.
But she doesn’t, no matter how desperate I am for my own mother to revert to the woman she was before she decided it would be better to walk down the path father did and drown herself in cheap alcohol.
“You know,” she begins, her voice low and scratchy, “no one’s ever gonna love you, right?”
I don’t hear it, but I feel it all the same. The ache of my heart shattering into a million little pieces.
How can she say something like that? She’s mymother.
“You’re the reason we’re the way we are. You pushed us into this drunken life by being born. We never wanted a kid or to get married.” She twists my ear, her glare searing through me. “But I got pregnant with you, and we were both forced to marry each other and raise a child we didn’t even want.”
“You could’ve had an abortion,” I say, trying to hide all my emotions but failing miserably.
“Oh, trust me, I wanted to,” she says on a humorless laugh, “but it was too late when I found out I was pregnant. Do you know how expensive it is to raise a child if you’re jobless?” she spits, shaking her head as if I am the reason she didn’t have a job. “Your father wasn’t much better either, couldn’t hold onto a job for dear life.”
I stay silent, swallowing everything I want to complain about, too. Not sure what I can say to alleviate either of our pains.
She clutches the front of my shabby, two sizes too small shirt and pulls me closer. I’m almost taller than her now. “You’re worthless, unwanted waste of space, doomed to spend the rest of your life alone. If your own parents couldn’t love you, no one would,” she curses at me, pushing my chest at the end of her words as contempt radiates from every pore in her body.