Here's part of something that I am working on.. Comments anyone??
Please and Thank You!!
“He then proceeded to sexually abuse me. He would bring in his girlfriends and they would force me to have sex with them; then he’d force me to do it with him, which was disgusting.” Poor Josh! I couldn’t believe the type of things his father did to him.
“Every few days I would be lying in the Emergency Room at the local hospital waiting for cat scans and x-rays to come back. My father had insurance, so I never had to pay for treatment. The doctors, however, were suspicious of my new injuries that I came in with every few days, but I kept my mouth shut. I was afraid that if I told someone what was happening at home my father would hurt me more.
“As the months passed, my father became more violent. He hit me more, but he also started using things like baseball bats and knives. He would cut my wrists and he would squeeze them to make more blood flow from the wounds; the cuts would bleed for hours after my father was finished with me. His girlfriends and he kept up with the sexual abuse too.
“After my father would leave for his eighteen hour days at the factory, I would go to another Emergency Room across town from the one I went to in the beginning, and there the doctors would give me transfusions. After a few days of me coming in with cut wrists and almost half my blood gone from my body, the doctors concluded that I was doing this to myself for attention and they admitted me to the psychiatric ward for a total of ten days.
“I didn’t mind being in the hospital as much as I thought I would. I got good meals and someone was always there to keep me company. I was also away from my father and his abuse; I didn’t even bother to call him to tell him where I was. I was finally safe, for a while anyway.
“Ten days came and went. I was released from the hospital and very reluctant to go home, but I didn’t have a choice. I knew that my father was going to be so pissed at me and that he was going to hurt me like he never hurt me before. I was right.” He stopped as he gagged again; I hurried to the trash can and shoved it under his mouth just as he vomited up his breakfast. He was very upset, that much was clear.
“Josh, you can stop now. I get it. He hurt you.” I wiped his face with a wash cloth. The cool water seem to have a calming effect on him. “I understand, Josh,” but he continued on with his story as if he didn’t hear me; he was in that house with his father again. He was reliving his tragic past.
“The minute I walked through the door my father started chasing me with a knife. I knew that he was going to kill me. I kept outsmarting him for a while but I made one wrong move and my father cornered me. He began to stab me repeatedly in my chest and my legs.” Josh came back to the present suddenly; he lifted up his shirt to show me the scars on his chest left by his father’s hatred. “Then when my father thought that I was done for, he left while I was on the floor gasping for breath as I vomited up blood. When he walked out of the front door, the police were waiting for him. They took him to custody and he was eventually booked on charges of child abuse, physically, emotionally, and sexually, because I was a minor and attempted murder. He was found guilty for all charges as were all of his various girlfriends who had sexually abused me.
“The paramedics came in and took me to the hospital where I remained in the intensive care unit for four weeks, or a month; however you want to look at it. Regardless, I recovered in the hospital for a total of two months, my stay in the intensive care plus my stay in the regular part of the hospital. I was released in the month of May to my grandmother, my father’s mother who I had never known growing up, who lived in Los Angeles.”
Josh turned to look at me then. His big, baby blue eyes were filled with tears again as he laid his head against my chest. I wrapped my arms around him and held him tightly to me because there were no words that I could say to make him feel better because I had been there; nothing can make a person who lived with an abusive parent feel better.
“Josh,” I whispered. “I know how you feel.”
“You can’t possibly know how I feel, Elizabeth.”
“I do, Josh. My mother abused me, too.”
“Elizabeth! Is that your way of joking about this?” he asked.
“No, Josh.” I lifted up my shirt to show Josh the scars on my own stomach made there by my mother some years ago.
Is there a particular reason that he didn't run away from home earlier, or that he didn't turn his dad in, or that the doctor's took that long to suspect something (and were way off target)?
ReplyDeleteI just find it hard to believe that -anyone- would put up with this kind of abuse for that long.
I also find it hard to believe that Josh's dad would be able to keep a girlfriend, let alone multiple. It seems like, if nothing else, one of them would end up growing a heart and reporting everything that was happening...
This story really is becoming tragic.... two highly abused kids who die at the end...
Are you sure you want Josh to reveal all this at once? Maybe in context it will make more sense, but it seems a bit abrupt.
have you ever heard of the cycle of abuse?? that's why josh never turned his father in and never ran away..
ReplyDeletei did a lot of research into abuse.. people who are abused tend to go back to the people who abuse them because they are worried about what will happen to them if they don't go back..
josh's father never had the same girlfriend abuse josh, so they never had a chance "to grow a heart"..
as far as the dying at the end of the book thing, you'll have to wait til i write the next book to know if the did die or not..
and josh's father is a very suductive man.. that's why he keeps having girlfriends..
ReplyDelete