Trigger Warning: Extreme Horror: Contains Strong Sexual Content, Violence, Drug Use, and Language. (12 page)

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma. Please, Gramma. Stop, Gramma.

This stain is a waste of potential life! Life wasted on the inside of your shorts, just because you were too horny to keep your filthy hands off your widdler! What were you thinking about when you were touching yourself? Were you thinking about your sweet dead mama? Surely not, or else you would have kept your hands to yourself. So what were you thinking about? One of them harlots! One of them Whores of Babylon! You know that all who enter Babylon are lost, don’t you, Robbie? Don’t you?

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma.

Do you want to be lost, Robbie?

No, Gramma. No, Gramma.

If I see any more stains on your shorts, if I see any stains on your bed, on the carpet, if I hear you’ve been seeing one of them harlots, touching their skin or their insides, I will cut that widdler of yours right off! You understand, Robbie? You understand?

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma.

Then she left, slamming the door.

…34 YEARS AGO (1975)

It was the summer
Jaws
came out and everyone who left the cinema was afraid to go into the water. I remember this because I kept seeing ads for the film next to the article about my dead parents, and thinking to myself:
I wish I could be afraid of something so silly
.

Instead, I had to fear what would happen to me and my sister.

I feared that we’d have to live on the streets, that we’d starve to death begging for food, that we’d become frozen to the pavement in some alley during the harsh Chicago winter.

That would have been a better fate.

Instead, the courts gave our grandparents (whom our father referred to as “religious pecans”) custody and we were moved to a state and town we knew nothing about:

Hell, North Dakota.

You couldn’t find a town or city on any atlas that would have described the next year of our lives more accurately…except, maybe, Hell, Michigan. (We would have been better off living there, because our crazy grandparents didn’t.)

Grampa and Gramma Wilkins lived on the outskirts of that appropriately named town, out in the middle of fucking nowhere (there was a lot of nowhere in North Dakota). If you followed Hell’s Main Street until it turned into Scenic Highway 200, and you kept going, past the trees and hills (yes, in
western
North Dakota, there
are
trees and hills), over the bridge that crosses the Hart River, and hooked a left over some railroad tracks, you eventually ended up on a gravel road that led to scattered houses separated by acres and acres of golden wheat fields. Our grandparents lived in a big ranch house in one of those fields; so secluded that their driveway was nearly a mile long.

Grampa drove us out there in his big pick-up, the big tires kicking up dust. And I remember the dread I felt.

My sister and I were used to the city: tall buildings, hot dog vendors, busy sidewalks and streets full of honking cars. Out here, it was dead. Quiet. Too quiet.

Grampa stared straight ahead at the ranch house as it loomed toward us like a gothic nightmare. He was a quiet man. Didn’t say much: less than two words since picking us up at the Bismarck airport. There was a tiny calendar pinned to his dashboard: Jesus knocking on a door, waiting for an answer. On top of the dash was a book titled
The Great Controversy between Christ and His Angels and Satan and his Angels
.

Religious pecans. That’s what our father had called them. It wasn’t offensive because they were his parents. He grew up with them. He knew all too well. Said he barely escaped alive. But never went into too much detail.

“Some people just want to believe in
something
very badly,” he had told me once. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But some people’s beliefs are more important to them than people. They will hurt and neglect others because of their beliefs. It’s called fanaticism. And it’s very dangerous.”

As if losing our parents wasn’t bad enough, now we
lived
with these pecans! And since we were minors, let’s not bullshit: according to the United State government, these pecans
owned
us. Custody is just a nice way of saying that.

Our dad had broken off contact with the pecans before Delilah and I were ever born. We had literally never met them until our parents died.

I held my sister’s hand as Grampa pulled into the driveway. I could see tears in her eyes. She was just as scared (maybe more) as I.

“Here we are,” Grampa said, glancing at us dismissively. “Home sweet home.”

Gramma greeted us in the foyer with a big smile and a hug, kissing our heads, saying how great it was to finally meet us after all these years.

Delilah and I didn’t say anything. We were wide-eyed, trembling.

“Don’t be afraid, my dearies,” Gramma said. “We won’t bite, will we, Arthur?”

Our Grampa, Arthur, only hrmphed.

She cooked us dinner (if you could call it that): some kinda weird loaf made of Special K cereal and cottage cheese.

“I’m guessing your mommy and daddy fed you meat,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Well, we don’t eat the flesh of animals in this household. The Prophetess White said that if we were to eat flesh diets, God would have provided animals to feast upon in the Garden. You must flee from the evils of devouring flesh and instead feast only upon fruits, nuts, and vegetables. This is God’s original plan. Amen.”

Grampa said, “Hrmph.”

“What about cheese?” I asked. “Isn’t there cheese in this? That’s not a nut, fruit, or vegetable.” (But you’re a nut, I wanted to add.)

“There’s no cheese,” she said.

“But you said it’s cottage cheese loaf.”

“It’s just a name,” she said. “Now eat.”

At an early age, I would learn that our grandparents weren’t only self-righteous, but that they were also huge hypocrites (the folly of those who put themselves up on pedestals).

Our grandparents had set up separate bedrooms for me and my sister, because “boys and girls should never sleep in the same room, or else they might be tempted to lie with one another.”

Delilah didn’t want to sleep alone and wouldn’t let go of my hand.

Gramma scolded her.

“Get to your room now, young missy!”

“But I want to sleep with Robbie.”

“Girls don’t sleep with boys,” she said. “Don’t be a hussy! Get in your room now!”

“She’s afraid of the dark,” I interjected.

“Too bad,” Gramma said. “The world is a dark place, so she better get used to it.”

Delilah cried as Gramma dragged her into the bedroom (at the end of a long hallway) and locked the door.

That was a bad sign: the locks were on the outside.

I closed the door to my room, willingly…and cried as I listened to my sister’s shrieks from down the hall. God, it sounded like she was dying.

At some point in the night, one of the grandparents got up and marched to the end of the hall (the floorboards squeaking and creaking), undid the latch, and opened the door, slammed it shut…the screaming stopped.

They fucking killed her
, I thought, minus the expletive.

I shivered under the sheets in my barren room (only a bed, four white walls, a hardwood floor, and a painting of Prophetess White), fearing that my sister was dead.

After an hour or so, I heard her bedroom door open again, close, lock, and then the footsteps moving up the hall.

Part of me wanted to get up and knock on her door…but I was frozen.

The blank face of the moon stared at me through the window. A bird screamed in the night. The noise was awful: sounded like someone killing a baby.

We were in the middle of nowhere, our parents were dead, and we were living with religious pecans.

It was the first time I had considered killing myself.

I was eight.

***

We weren’t allowed to watch movies or read fiction. We weren’t allowed to eat meat. We weren’t allowed to drink soda because it had caffeine (even though Gramma drank tea). We weren’t allowed to attend public school, because it was run by the government and they would try to indoctrinate us with satanic ideas about evolution and sex. We weren’t allowed contact with anyone outside the church (which met every Saturday, because Sunday was the Mark of the Beast, and all those who worshipped on Sunday would be cast into hell during the Third Coming of Christ, also known as the Second Death, when Jesus would resurrect the evil dead and slay them with fire, and God’s remnant—the Last Day Adventists—would watch with glee as God cleansed the earth and set His New Kingdom upon the ashes of the wicked, where God’s chosen would live forever and ever). And we weren’t allowed to talk to niggers.

My sister wasn’t dead, but she looked dead inside.

She stopped talking.

Stopped crying.

Stopped feeling.

She tried to stop eating…but Gramma would shove whatever concoction she mixed together in that kitchen of hers down Delilah’s throat: soybean casserole, leek pie, soy dogs, gluten patties, lentil stew, tofu nut loaf, raw potato, facon (fake bacon). Gramma also made us swallow these terrible drinks that tasted like dirty dishwater (maybe they were).

She always talked about having good blood; not blood tainted by the flesh of animals or addictive chemicals.

Said we needed to be pure for Jesus’ Second Coming.

We needed strength for when the soldiers would come for us. Soldiers of the Vatican’s New World Order seeking out Sabbath Keepers.

In the end times, all Sabbath Keepers would be rounded up and tortured in unimaginable ways. But it was an honor to die like this: to die for Christ and Sister White. Yet we needed to prepare. Prepare to flee into the mountains, the woods. To fight the Catholic-run government when it rose up and declared a bounty on all Sabbath Keepers.

These were the kinds of paranoid rants we’d hear from Gramma, from the church she forced us to attend every Sabbath. And every Sabbath, there’d be a children’s story. The piano music would change to “Jesus Loves Me” and all the obedient children would flock to the front pew and sit down, waiting to hear some shit-story about subservience to god.

My sister and I always went to the front pew. We had no choice. It was either that or a whipping from Grampa’s belt.

One time, Gramma had the duty of performing the children’s story…with a little help from her friends of the Last Day Adventists, Pecans for Sister White. These members of this infected church-body were dressed like animals: a Bunny, a Dog, a Rat, a Moose, a Cat, and randomly, a Clown.

The mascots scared the children. We didn’t like them waving at us.

I held my sister’s hand as the Bunny looked through us with its big vacant eyes, gesturing for us to stand up and sing.

We obeyed (out of fear) as the furries marched their padded feet and squeaked a tune about fighting in the Lord’s army. When they piped out the last note, the furries saluted (uncomfortably close to a Nazi salute, now that I think about it).

We saluted back.

Then (left of stage) entered the Devil (or, a church member wearing a Devil’s mask, rather).

“Why do you worship on Sabbath when all other Christians worship on Sunday?” the Devil asked the furries (and clown).

“Because God made the Sabbath day holy and told us to rest on that day and worship Him,” the Bunny said in its pre-pubescent, high-pitched voice. “It’s the fourth commandment!”

“But don’t you know that the Catholic Church changed the Sabbath-day to Sunday?” the Devil asked.

“And this is how you will know the antichrist,” the Dog turned to us, felt tongue hanging out of its maw. “He will speak against the Most High and try to change the set times and the laws.”

“No one has the right to change God’s laws,” the Cat cried. “Now, shoo you mean ol’ devil. Get out of here.”

The furries (and clown) then chased the Devil from the sanctuary, as the kids giggled. My sister and I did not. Our faces were solemn…cold.

Gramma, who had sat down next to a little black boy to watch her drama unfold, stood back up, microphone in her frail, wrinkled hand, and turned to us.

“When they capture and torture you, they will want you to defend your beliefs. That’s why you must read and study the Scriptures, the writings of Prophetess White. God’s Word will be your ammo in the end times. If you are weak in faith, if you have unclean blood, if you are not strong enough to withstand the torture of the Papacy and their foot soldiers…your soul will be destroyed.”

The laughter and giggles were over. Shit just got real.

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28. That’s our Bible verse for today, children. Have a happy Sabbath.”

Kids in that church cried a lot, for some reason.