InsaneJournal

#15 - Traumatized - Adrien Odessa

There was a boy—that’s right, a boy, very young, very naïve, very small and cute and sweet and—

He stopped, the vague vignette of a memory floating in his mind, threatening to leave and never be found again. Two mental hands greedily grasped for more. What else was there?

A woman. The boy’s mother—a coveted beauty, a thrown away whore.

In the boy’s eyes she was a woman of high standing, a woman that the men wanted but could not have. A statue of beauty and elegance. Someone that the women were jealous of, wanting that kind of touch that was so very rare in their society.

In the men’s eyes she was a whore, a pretty prostitute that could be taken ever so often at their own wish. She was a lovely work, kind on the eyes, even kinder when underneath them, but nothing more than French trash.

In the women’s eyes she was a fallen socialite, falling so far from her high class upbringings to the dirty ghettos of New York City. She was nothing more than a temporary satisfaction for their husbands, a relief for them not to have to satisfy their husbands all the time.

He was not aware. Hardly, barely aware of what was going on around him. But the boy would’ve preferred to continue his innocence, and the mother would’ve wanted him to stay blindfolded and in the dark, but it happened. The blindfold was ripped off and thrown aside. Dirt, of course, cannot always be hidden. A wall of shit can never be fully white washed.

He watched his statue of beauty be defiled through a pair of 7-year-old eyes—eyes that did not understand, but could memorize. He witnessed his mother’s ultimate fall from grace under the hands of not one nor two, but three pairs of grubby dirty hands and feet and bodies coming at her from all sides, and none of those bodies belonged to his father.

(He never forgot to wash his hands again, afterwards. He scrubbed and scrubbed all the dirt and filth grime from those fingernails. He scrubbed and scrubbed the dirt and grime from the bed sheets, but when those wouldn’t recede he burnt them.)

Years later those very same men would beg him to return and save the family, establish the family back to its former glory, with that very same woman hostage.

He threw the newspaper—headlining “College Student Gang Raped”—off to the side as a hand raised up to wipe the memories from his eyes.

They didn’t leave. A genius, after all, could never forget.