Keeping my screams pressed down, I hold my hand over my mouth and watch when he takes the back of Jenise’s head and shoves her face hard into the bowl of creamed corn.
She lifts her head slowly and turns to the side after he takes his hand away. I’m frozen as I watch her look at me, her shock mixed with the corn that drips off her nose, hidden in her burning eyes as she wipes them, and within her lungs as she gasps for air.
As soon as it happens, my defenses click in and I detach. My father’s demon swirls around us, come to possess every breath we take. I don’t look at the monster in our kitchen; I’m terrified he’s going to hurt us—badly.
My dreams begin, and more than the physical act of violence itself, I notice the smaller details around me like the colors in our kitchen.
I see the pale yellow of the corn as it drips down Jenise’s face. It matches the paint on the walls. I see the white of the porcelain bowl as it rocks back and forth from the shock of her face smashed down in it.
I hear the sound of dullness made by the spoon that once rested by the bowl of corn, now fallen to the floor, and I see the beautiful color of my sister’s hazel eyes as they squint and blink.
I watch her mouth open as she tries to regain her breath and her white shirt becomes blotched with stains the color of butter. My eyes see the sky blue of the vinyl booth I sit in and the white rope of the leather ribbing that seams it.
A few years earlier I’d taken a knife and sliced it, making neat and orderly cuts about an inch apart, beginning at my father’s seat and ending to my left at my sister’s spot.
It was as if I tried to cut myself away from the yelling, terror, and disgust, perhaps even to cut myself out of my family. Anywhere seemed better than being at the dinner table with them.
Everything moves in slow motion, except when my father takes his belt from the loops in his pants; that move was so quick it seems blurred to my eyes.
One half of my mind knows my body is present within the trauma and craziness, and the other half is somewhere in the shadows, observing.
By drifting away and changing my focus to the incidental details around the violence, rather than the violence itself, I escape and I am protected from seeing my father as someone I once knew.
I can’t face the equation: my father + alcoholic = stranger. Not yet. Associating violence with my family? It’s too horrific for me to fully take in. Even at eight-years-old, I say to myself, isn’t this more than what a normal punishment should be?
I let the colors, sounds, and wandering thoughts fill my mind, and I am shielded with a veil that offers me the briefest of interludes and allows me to cope.
Jenise gets up from the table without emotion and heads to her bedroom to clean up. She calmly looks straight ahead, ignoring the shouting and the belt in my father’s hand.
“Look at him,” I scream only to myself. “Tell him you’re sorry and go eat the corn.”
His face is twisting. I can see in his eyes she’s going to be sorry for standing up to him. As the darkness takes him over completely, he whips Jenise with his belt again and again.
“Run, Nicky, run!” The voice inside me comes to life, finally pushing my body to react.
I scoot off the blue triangular booth, crawl under the kitchen table and out to the dining room, and hide behind some boxes under the long, mahogany table. My heart is beating hard. The blood pulses loudly in my ears and pounds inside my face. I am sure he can hear me.
MAR
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