Previously titled: 'he liked to hit me there.'
Thanks everyone who's reviewed I am so grateful and soooo happy to get it featured. You'll be happy to know ( i hope) that their is a second part planned...maybe even a third. Perhaps I should make it into a little novel...who knows!
Anyway, thanks so much!
***
He liked to hit me there. He’d thump me with his iron fists, shatter a good few ribs, bruise my woman breasts a deep yellow. Perhaps it brought him a sort of sadistic satisfaction.
When my belly had become noticeably full, he spared me such indignities. He directed his brutal knuckles to my face only. The blows were just as painful, though somehow less humiliating.
I hadn’t told him I was with child. I had just let my belly swell. When the fact that I was pregnant became unquestionably perceptible, he’d given me his harsh, piercingly cold glare, which said: ‘so, I’ve another mouth to feed.’ He then binged on an entire bottle of odourless vodka.
I would’ve told him. Only, he is not the father of the child inside of me. I would be a dead woman if he knew. Well, I am as good as. You see, the baby growing inside of me will be born dark-skinned with tightly curled hair.
My husband and I are both pale and fair. The dreadful truth is that I am eight months pregnant with a black man’s baby.
My name is Dion, the year is nineteen-fifty-three, and I have had my Jaw, my Nose, and my Ribs broken so many times I have lost count.
***
His name is Jehu Scout. I married him at the naive age of seventeen, and bore our first child, my daughter Hyacinth, at eighteen.
He’s an unsuccessful writer, who drowns our financial sorrows in daily bouts of obscene drunkenness. He’s a hypocritical, violent, brutal man. My body bears the proof of this fact: the healed fractures, the rich bruising, the wounds, the scars. Quite unfortunately, I am a living testimony of his mercilessness.
Hyacinth is a beautiful girl: inquisitive and energetic, with wavy blonde hair just like my own. At six years, she tires me often.
It is shameful: the fact that she knows and understands what Daddy does to Mummy. She does not deserve the turmoil with which her curious little mind is swamped.
Her gleaming blue eyes full of anxiety, Hyacinth will tap at my waist, ask, ‘did Daddy hurt you?’
I’ll brush away the angry tears – the tears of a woman, belittled, made fragile – brimming my eyes, sniffle, say, ‘Daddy’s upset, Hyacinth, that’s all.’
I will picture Jehu, slouched against the bar of the local pub, splurging the few pennies he earns shifting coal, brawling, downing pint after pint. Tears threaten once again. I will clench my jaw and purse my lips to restrain them, to keep them from spilling.
You see, if I cry, I will have succumbed.
I am not weak.
I will never succumb.
. And, if you yourself are in an abusive relationship, tell somebody.