I prayed for an out for years before it actually came.
I wished with everything in me that someone would come and save me from my life, take me away from the hardships that were foisted upon my shoulders to carry with me the rest of my life. I dreamt of someone, anyone, breaking down the front door to my family home, killing my family, and spiriting me away to some life I never knew I was supposed to have where I would live happily ever after. I wished I could be saved from a life of being shit on day after day. Wished someone would notice the way the bruises wouldn’t go away, or smell the alcohol on my clothes, or just call for a wellness check. Anything.
I had given up hope by the point it actually came to matter. I had decided that it was me who needed to save me, that no one out there was going to do it for me no matter how much I wanted it. I needed to do something about my shitty circumstances, learn how to do better for myself, work around the limitations I had, and fight my way to something better. Literally in some cases. In most cases, if I’m being honest.
The first time I beat my father up I was 15. For around six months, I had been secretly taking martial arts lessons after school I paid for with money I had stolen from my mother’s wallet. Her secret wallet that she only brought on “business trips,” which meant she wouldn’t be able to confront anyone about it unless we were alone. Or unless she wanted my father to find out. The Gods knew she wouldn’t have ever let me have a job. Who would watch her spare kids, then if I were to be allowed out long enough to work? Who would take the beatings that my father so desperately wished to impart on her instead?
I came home from one of the very same lessons the day it happened. He was drunk. Pissed off about something my mother had said to him before she left again. Something about him not being man enough to take her anywhere or something. I couldn’t quite understand him. I came in and went upstairs immediately because the smell of alcohol was strong enough I could taste it, upended beer cans strewn around the living room table and rolling back and forth on the floor as if they had just found their way there and were slowly coming to a stop. He didn’t like that I didn’t greet him. He ran up the stairs after me, tripping over one of the steps in his drunken stupor and nearly falling on his face before managing to catch himself. He got back to his feet, even angrier at this point, and nearly bowled me over in his haste to mete out whatever punishment he saw fit. Typically in the form of his fists against my face, or my ribs, or my back.
He didn’t even make it into my room before my fist connected with his eye socket. I felt it crack beneath my knuckles. Perhaps someone else would have stopped, worried that they’d caused irreparable damage. Perhaps someone else would have called the police or stopped to help them. Not me. I didn’t even hesitate before I followed up on it. I don’t even think he saw me move. Suddenly, the top of my foot found his ribs and he couldn’t breathe. All the air just completely expelled from his lungs. He fell backward into the hallway, gasping like a fish while he tried to draw in a breath that just wouldn’t come, and I watched it impassively until he passed out. He started breathing again when he was unconscious and the shock had time to wear off. I knew it wouldn’t kill him. I might have wanted it to. I didn’t even wait to see what he would do about it when he woke up, either. I just closed the door, locked it, put on a pair of headphones, and fell asleep.
He didn’t bother me again for a while after that.
My mother was a different matter when she was drunk. Sober, too, but it was worse when she was drunk. She never hit me but, in a way, her treatment felt worse. She let me know how little she cared for me. She let me know how much everything she was forced to do for me was a burden to her that she couldn’t wait to be free from. Why hadn’t I just died in the womb like some of her other children, she’d ask. Why hadn’t I just stopped breathing like she’d prayed for night after night? She’d tell me how disgusting she found it that she had to carry me and her other children for nine months only to have to care for us for another 18 years after that. If only my father had killed us all like he’d tried to do a few times when he was drunk. If only she’d let him. I couldn’t get away from it, either. She would yell it at me through my bedroom door, pounding on it over and over again to try and get me to come out, to try and make me face her as she told me the most horrid things she felt about me.
Things I had come to think of myself, eventually.
She laughed at my father when she saw what I had done. Told him he was worthless for letting a piece of shit like me beat him up.
“Aren’t you supposed to be the man of the house, Claude? You can’t even protect yourself from one child! Look at your face! You look like your eye and a hammer had a really raunchy get together,” she’d said. I wasn’t in the room when it happened, but I could hear some things smashing. Glass being thrown, furniture being broken.
“Do you think you’re intimidating me, Claude? With that face? If a 15 year old can kick your ass, do you think I find you scary because you’re breaking shit? Please,” she scoffed. Some further commotion happened for a while before things settled down. Doors slammed. Cars took off. I was alone. Well, alone with the others. We didn’t talk much and they kept to themselves, otherwise. They might have been in a similar situation as me, but I wouldn’t know. Dear old Mom and Dad kept them away from me and poisoned to the idea of me. You’d have thought opinions spoonfed to them by people as obviously terrible as they were wouldn’t be worth the air used to spout them but apparently it was more than enough for them. I was the reason our parents treated them that way, in their eyes. So they didn’t talk to me. Which, I suppose, isn’t too unexpected from a bunch of kids nine and under, but it did burn from time to time. Especially when the depression was at its worst.
I decided I was done with her that same day. They’d both gone off in their respective vehicles. Probably to separate bars where they would get even drunker and then drive back home miraculously without killing themselves or others or getting pulled over. It’s about the only thing impressive about them, really. Their ability to stay alive despite being stupid as fuck. I left my room, went into theirs, grabbed my mom’s second wallet from the secret compartment she’d had shoddily put into the wall by one of her flings a few years ago. I’d walked in on him doing it, actually. My mother hadn’t been home. The guy was okay. Stupid, though. He did look surprised to see me, but told me everything was fine and that I should go back to bed. He’d be gone as soon as possible. Forget he was even there. He didn’t even try to justify his presence as a handyman or something. Didn’t make any excuses. If I were anyone else, I might have told my father about it right there and my mother would have been put out on her ass immediately. I didn’t know that then, I suppose. I was rather hoping she’d give him an incurable STD or something and thought he deserved to be treated exactly as he treated me. I don’t regret it.
I took the wallet from the hole, put the piece of wood back together, and brought it back to my room. There was about two grand in hundreds inside the wallet, a Driver’s license with a fake name on it, a Passport with the same fake name—I’m not sure how she even managed to get such quality forgeries, or why she would have gone to the trouble to do something so over the top, especially considering how drunk my father was all the time—and some receipts from hotels she’d stayed at, phone numbers written on sticky notes, and some other random stuff you’d find in a wallet. All incredibly incriminating stuff.
Of course the first thing I did was take the money. Are you kidding? No consequences and she’s a bitch. I was also 15 and two grand is an insane amount of money at that age. I took pictures of all of the evidence with my phone—also purchased with my mother’s stolen money; I’m sure she stole it from my father in the first place, too—including a video of the cubby. I put the wallet, sans the money, back inside and texted my mother from one of those fake number apps using one of the guys names—one of the notes had a heart by the name—and asked her where she was and if she was going to be able to meet again soon. She texted back almost immediately, which surprised me.
You know you’re not supposed to text me on this phone, Gerry!
Of course, she had a different phone.
My old phone broke and I lost all my contacts. The only number I remembered was this one, sorry. What’s the number again? I’ll call you there instead, I texted back, chuckling to myself. I might have been nervous if there was any way for her to bring this back on me. She didn’t know I had a phone, didn’t know I knew about the cubby—I didn’t take enough money for her to notice, usually, save for that time—and the only way she could connect it to me would be the money. Money that she couldn’t confront me about if she wanted to remain married to my father. The man who she’d gotten all this money from in the first place and the man who put up with her moods for some reason.
I’m not really sure why they stayed together, to be honest. Because they were evil people and they bonded over that? I don’t like to think about them much, if I’m being honest. Or about that time in my life. My time on Earth.
She texted back a different number, but told me not to call it because she didn’t have it with her. You know I’m married, Gerry. I can’t bring that phone everywhere with me. I’ll call you tomorrow. I can probably go on another business trip this weekend.
I didn’t respond, but I did call the phone. Not surprisingly, no sound went off, but I did go back into her room to look for it. It wasn’t in the cubby which was either a rare piece of intelligence on her part, because although the wallet itself was very incriminating it wasn’t literally proof of her cheating, just that she had purchased hotel rooms for her business trip and some men had given her their numbers. Hence why I had texted her. I said rare piece of intelligence, though, because that’s exactly what it was. I ended up finding the second phone inside an old pair of shoes in an abandoned shoe box near the wall under her bed. It was obvious it was hers because it was left on her side and was so obviously trying to hide it that I knew it was what I was looking for.
The phone was locked. The password was her birthday. I remember groaning at how stupidly easy this whole thing was because if I’d known it was going to be this easy I would have done it years ago. If God was going to suddenly decide to make my life easier, why hadn’t they done it when my father was kicking me in the stomach so hard that I’d thrown up. Or other things he hadn’t done since I was much younger. Things that make me wish I had killed him outright instead of just kicking the shit out of him a couple times. I guess I didn’t have it in me, then. I’m not sure why, though. If there was anyone in the world that I wished would stop breathing permanently, it was him. My mother, too, but in a more angsty, lonely, why-don’t-you-love-me kind of way rather than the cold, hateful kind of way I held the desire for my father’s demise.
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Fortunately, and unfortunately, too, I got my wish. It was my fault, too, even if I didn’t directly kill either of them. I can’t say I regret it, exactly, but that’s the kind of shit that finds its way into your nightmares for the rest of your life even if they did deserve it. And boy did that man deserve it.
This little moment of rebellion I’m describing is the event that led to my mother’s death, and subsequently, a year and a half later, my father’s, though he was in jail at that point. That’s putting the cart before the horse, I suppose, but it’s not as if you didn’t already put those two things together.
I spent thirty minutes taking photos and videos of the phones contents. Contacts, pictures, messages, videos—ew—and whatever else was in there. I saved it in my phone’s hidden album and then I put the phone back where I got it. Then, with the same number I had texted my mother with, I texted my father’s phone.
I sent him a picture of my mother. Doing things I don’t want to describe. To a man.
His response was to try and call me a few times followed by a few I’LL KILL YOU texts, all caps. Then nothing for the rest of the night. From either of them. They didn’t come home that night, either.
I wouldn’t find this out until a few days later in the middle of one of my classes, but he killed my mom that night. I mean, they just told me that my mother’s body had been found but I knew it was him, of course. My initial reaction was shock and guilt because I had done what I’d done. I’d provoked him. I never thought that he would kill her, though. Just leave her. Kick her out. I didn’t know what I was hoping for but it wasn’t that.
After that, I found out he’d called my mom and pretended he didn’t know anything. He asked where she was, said he wanted to apologize for being such a loser—they played a recording of the phone call to the court, which is the only reason I know that—and she ended up telling him just to come meet her at a different bar. He got in her car, they drove somewhere private where he could make up to her—also something I don’t want to think about because listening to my father, despicable as he is, describe the things he said and did to my mom in that capacity made me want to vomit, especially considering he still did it even though he had plans to kill her—and he ended up drowning her in a nearby river before walking back to his car, getting in it, and driving off somewhere else. The cameras outside the bar only caught him walking up to his car with soaking wet clothes and leaving somewhere in a hurry, though. There weren’t very many cameras back then.
I stayed with my father for a month following news of her death and the subsequent investigation. It didn’t take long for them to find the messages in my mother’s phone from “Gerry” or the call from my father directly preceding when she would have died based on what they found in the autopsy. He was angry. Angrier than I’d ever seen him.
I kicked his ass a couple more times before the cops came and took us away. Him to jail, me to a “temporary care facility,” which was actually just a mental hospital for children. It wasn’t bad, if I’m being honest. The other children were weird, but it was a mental health facility. The therapists were kind. The nurses, too. I missed it after I left.
He blamed me. Or he tried to, anyway. Once I told the officers what I had done and why I thought it was my fault she was dead. The officers were actually really kind to me so perhaps that’s why I cried as hard as I had. I wasn’t used to kindness. It probably helped that I was 15 and I looked much younger due to the malnourishment. They didn’t always remember to feed me, or feed me when they remembered. I don’t think a single person who saw me and heard my story after that thought it was a tragedy that my mother had died, or were surprised that my father had killed her. Or that he would kill her. They didn’t even bring my siblings in for questioning the way they did me. The trial itself took two sessions. One for the evidence to be laid out by the prosecution, and the second was my testimony. I didn’t cry that time. Or at least I mostly didn’t cry. I still felt guilty about it.
One of the therapists I spoke to in the facility after the trial helped me realize that what I had done wasn’t inherently wrong. It came from a place of hurt and, although it would be a bit more nuanced if an unrelated adult had done something similar, it was not wrong. Just an action that stemmed from a negative emotion. My mother was cheating on my father and I was only a child who was looking to get back at my parents for treating me so horribly. Any action my father decided to take after I had sent that message was entirely his own. He didn’t have to act on his anger the way that he did. He didn’t have to kill her. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.
I didn’t tell her about the money.
She also told me it wasn’t my fault that they didn’t have the capacity to love me as much as I deserved for them to. I may have cried in that therapy meeting, too.
Three months after the trial, my father was murdered in the prison he’d been sent to. Choked to death by his cellmate.
In the years that followed leading up to the event I’m building up to, I didn’t cry once. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. They discarded me after that. They shoved me in a foster home with people who were only slightly less horrible to me and cared only slightly more about my wellbeing but let me do whatever I want with no questions asked. I never saw my siblings again, either. I never stopped taking my martial arts lessons and even branched out into a few different kinds. I also took up the Blacksmithing Club at my highschool. The instructor, a kindly old man named Mr. Jenkins—because of course that was his name, right; what else would it have been?—took a liking to me. Perhaps because he knew my story, perhaps not. In any case, he let me stay after as long as I wanted, making cool swords I’d seen in different shows, testing out methods of folding the metal we learned during his instruction, giving me pointers and showing me better ways of doing things.
That whole year was ironically one of the happiest years I’d ever had, even if both my parents had died and I wouldn’t get to see my siblings again.
Mr. Jenkins died before the next school year started. I stopped going to Blacksmithing Club after that.
When I was 18, I was released from the foster home without much fanfare. They didn’t send me off with a big party or anything, but they wished me well which I suppose was all I could have expected, really. I went to college in California because there were more things to do there. They had clubs for adults, activities you could attend, people you could meet. Although I wasn’t too keen on the last part, I will admit I made a few friends. They didn’t become deeper or anything—I’d say I was a bit too abrasive and closed off for anything closer, not that that’s changed too much since—but I appreciated the connections all the same. I went to an Art school, actually. Even now, I’m surprised I managed to get in. They told me that, even though the pieces themselves lacked significant skill, they still told a story that “plucked at their heart strings.” I’d drawn a small comic of a couple finding a small bird and hiding it away in a cage, yelling all the while about the obligations they had to take care of it. They didn’t feed the bird, didn’t show it love. It lived it’s whole life inside this cage they kept in their attic. The bird withered away within the cage until eventually it got so thin it managed to escape from the bars, only to die because it wasn’t strong enough to fly out the open window.
I picked blacksmithing back up and rediscovered my love for it. I made swords that won awards, actually. Not only because they were beautiful, but because they worked, as well. They were sharp, durable, and still maintained their beauty despite the harsh conditions they had been formed under. I like to think of myself as the sword while I’m creating them.
I learned how to wield them, as well, because how could I ever hope to create something I did not understand intrinsically? If I did not know what it felt like to move with a sword, strike with it, defend with it, how would I know what the sword needed to be when I was crafting it? Others don’t feel the same, of course. They make swords, they make armor, they make whatever and it looks good, to be sure, but it doesn’t feel the way it feels to look at a sword that I make.
Looking at my swords feels like pain. It feels like loss, like losing yourself and finding yourself again, becoming something harder and different. It feels like grief and sorrow. It also feels like love. There is a painstaking amount of love I put into my swords when I craft them and, although the story the sword tells is one of sadness, the piece itself tells of the love I put into getting it to where it went. The struggle it took to find that love to place into the object in the first place. I am proud of each and every one of them, even now as I sit a universe away from Earth. I remember them and what I put into making them, and I find myself smiling about what they meant to me and how I almost didn’t pick the practice back up again after high school. I am glad that I did.
Things were stable for a while after that. I got my art degree at 20 while continuing to forge my swords. It was mostly about the ability to find new ways to express myself than any real necessity for the degree to obtain clients or notoriety from the credential, I suppose. People commissioned quite a lot from me by that point, actually. I wasn’t wanting for money, at the very least. I kept going to martial arts, as well. I got a few black belts, but that was mostly about loving the connection I’d found with my body rather than actually loving the fighting. I found that I loved the way I had learned to move my body. It made me feel good about myself in a way I can’t really describe all that well. Powerful. Graceful. Beautiful. The same way the swords looked after they’d been forged. There’s probably something poetic in there. I wasn’t an English major.
I saved up enough money to buy myself my own little studio. Well, it was a rather large barn away from the rest of society, but I paid some people to make it half into a studio apartment and half into a forge. There was even a basement where I displayed all the swords I made. Did I mention I made a lot of them?
Even the ones I didn’t sell ended up being something like 150 swords. If you know the normal timeline of making a sword, you’d know that I was churning those babies out to make so many within the four year period of moving to California to my subsequent permanent vacation from Earth, especially with the quality of the craftsmanship. They were art, yes, but they were also functional. Any one of those swords could be picked up off the wall and do some real damage with nary a dent. I made sure of that. Of course there were limits, but they were very well made swords. Mr. Jenkins did a wonderful job teaching me the proper way to fold the metal for strength and temper it for durability back in high school. I still think of him, this many years later.
Ironically, it isn’t until I find a sort of equilibrium with my life that the aforementioned “event” takes place. It doesn’t even happen with very much fanfare, either, despite what the dignified assertion of the order of events might have been. I’m simply in my studio using the forge, the hammer much too loud to hear anything else that might be happening around me—which is the reason I didn’t have any real response to the scenario other than a rather embarrassing ‘eep’—and then I feel a blast of cold air one second and the next I’m being yanked. I didn’t know what it was at the time but I find out it’s a portal when I flop out the other side. Emphasis on when because, although it was technically immediate as far as time itself is concerned, it was not immediate from my perspective. I had a rather interesting conversation and some even more interesting choices to make.
And so my story begins.