[Pacing around the room, he looks outside for a moment and pauses. The sky has darkened, and there’s storm clouds on the horizon. The wind rustles the leaves in the yard and whips them upwards into a frenzy as they get carried away.

  He sighs, “That… is only the beginning. If one thing is certain, at least your life should be better. I’ve made sure of that.”

  He puffs on his cigar and looks down at his weathered hands.

  “What will he think of me? Of our family, and of his grandparents? Some say that truth is best kept hidden when it reveals something painful. Fortunately I’ve never had the stomach for it.”

  Izriel sits back down at the desk and stretches his weary back, holding the pen in his hands he takes a sip of scotch and stares into the empty glass.

  “Right then, we’ve much to cover before I can show you the truths I’ve uncovered. First, my story. Then, what I’ve found.”

  The ink comes to life as his hand starts to move, its flows out of him like a river carving its way through stones worn smooth over time. ]

  There was actually a fair but of death in my life starting at this point. My Aunt Lilly died from cancer, Aunt Vina died of cancer, and my Uncle Rich hung himself in his basement.

  Uncle Rich was the harder of the three, he was my Aunt Cricket’s husband. Her two children Richie and Addison, were devastated in more ways than one. Little Rich had wandered down to the basement to find him like that, and had been crying for spider-man to save him. Ruined their lives.

  My little cousin Isabelle got struck by a car and died, she was grounded by her parents and was running across the street to her friends house when a truck collided with her, and they never caught the driver.

  It really bothered me when a week later while at school, (after Bill) that this kid in my class was crying and I asked him what was wrong. He said his parents were getting divorced, and I wouldn’t understand his pain. I was thinking to myself, that’s the best you’ve got? You think I don’t understand that pain?

  In middle school I grew my hair out to my shoulders, began wearing mostly black clothes with studded belts, band T-Shirts and skateboarding or roller blading. I had redone my bike by sanding it, painting it myself, getting new wheels, and kept it chained to our apartment fence but someone stole it. Skateboards and blades could go inside so, I went forward with those as they were easier to keep from being stolen.

  Somewhere around here, I began playing pool more. I was really good at it. Sometimes when I was at Grandma Piggy’s house I would play for hours in their basement. Which brings me to my second fight that I remember.

  My mom dropped me off at the gas station so I could skateboard to the local American Legion where I was going to play some pool. At the gas station two kid’s I knew from school were there skateboarding and they asked to look at my shoes, and to try them on. I let the one kid, Alex, try on my shoes. He began to walk off, trying to steal them. I whacked him in the head with my skateboard and the other kid came after me, I was about to hit him too but he stopped. I got my shoes back and skated on down to the Legion where I played pool.

  Some old drunkard there was teaching me the ins and out’s of shooting pool. He took a empty beer bottle on the table and had me go in and out of it with my cue repeatedly to learn cue control. Then I would pause, pretend make a shot by going inside the bottle and back out quickly. It was pretty effective. I learned some trick shots there too. I would later grow up and play pool at bars with friends for money, always had a knack for the game.

  Something about this whole thing reminds me of John, a bit more on his mindset anyway. He was a veteran of Desert Storm with PTSD. He told me once as he stared into my eyes, that I reminded him of a kid he had to kill when he was in the war. Which is why he had a drinking problem.

  I think he stopped while he was with my mom, but when they broke up he fell deep into it. I visited him once as an adult, and all I remember was his apartment absolutely filled with empty beer bottles and the stench of urine. He was not looking good, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was no longer with us. I have a soft spot in my heart for John, and I will never forget the reading we did together or the smell of fresh coffee from his cup.

  It's worth mentioning that I’ve never been close with my mother. My grandparents told me that when my mom was in the hospital with me the doctor had asked them if they might be willing to take custody, and that he’d never seen a mother not bond with her child in the way we had not. I’m not sure the intricacies behind this, but the story is true. We never bonded, and though I don’t hate her for everything that happened or the next chapter of my life you’re going to see, I have no feeling for her one way or the other. I’m certain if she dies, I’ll likely not shed a tear at the funeral. It’s not out of being mean that I say this, It’s just how I truly feel. I think the coming pages may begin to explain why.

  We can begin with an event around this period where I was saving spare bits of change from my grandpa. A dollar here, a dollar there, maybe some change from our couch cushions. I knew mothers day was coming up and I wanted to buy something nice for my mom. I saved up about 13 dollars, and the last five came from grandpa.

  However my mom knew he gave me a five, so when we went to taco bell that evening I vividly remember this experience. She told me that if I wanted to eat, since I had my own money I would have to buy my own dinner. I was maybe ten years old. I knew if I spent the money to eat, I wouldn’t have enough to get her a present, so I didn’t get anything. I remember her getting tacos and eating them in the car. I remember the sound of her chewing, the way she looked when she was talking while eating. She was saying it was my fault if I went hungry because I had money and didn’t want to use it. To this day, I hate the sound of people chewing food. I listened to her eat the entire way home.

  When I was at grandpa’s next I asked him to take me to dollar general because I had scoped out something I wanted to get her. It was a figurine made of glass that was two dolphins, a kind of bathroom decoration you might find. It was about all the money I had, but I was excited about it. I was sure she was going to like it, and I’d been saving up for a long time.

  To my surprise, when I gave it to her she began screaming at me. She said I should know she doesn’t like dolphins, that my gift was stupid, and she even grounded me from my grandparents. I was heartbroken, big time. I felt like such a pile of crap, I felt like a bad son, I was really sorry for getting her a bad gift. My mom made the mistake of calling my grandparents and telling them about my awful present, and they picked me up.

  They asked me about it and I told them, and my aunt Tonya found out. My uncle Chad and Aunt Tonya were amazing people, they are the parents of my best friend and cousin, Acey.

  Tonya said she loved dolphins and would be delighted to have my gift, so I brought it from my moms and was able to give it to them. I remember seeing it in her bathroom, and I loved her for that. My family made me understand I didn’t do anything bad, and that it was my mom overreacting.

  It was a similar situation when my grandma came back from kentucky and gifted me a very small, but very welcomed gift of a swiss army knife. It was about an inch long with a dull blade, it was really just a neat gift and I loved it. I actually had a container of various knives hidden at their house that they let me collect over the years, and not once did I do anything bad with them. Never injured, never cut anything crazy up, just collected them.

  My mom found out and when I showed her the awesome gift at my grandparents she tried to take it from my hands. I clenched down tight and refused to let go, so she tackled me. He tongue was hanging out of her mouth she was so mad, she was trying to wrench it from my hands as I was on the floor begging her to let me keep it, but she kept going and digging her nails into my hands. My grandma crouched down and looked me in the eye and frowned, and said it’s okay Izriel. Just let it go. So I listened, and let it go. I never seen it again.

  I don’t know why my mom did stuff like that, but there’s numerous examples through the years.

  These are the nicer ones I remember, the rest come later in this tale.

  In the midst of middle school I did begin to learn playing guitar. I first borrowed my dads old fender, and began to learn on that. My mom took me to her and John’s friend who lived by the river. He was a drunk old rocker who wore cut off t shirts with giant holes in the arms to make it into a tanktop.

  He shotgunned beer and played on his porch all night, he was a nice guy. He taught me how to play smoke on the water, and what some of the musical notes were. Later, my grandfather told me if I learned to play his favorite song “Wish you were here” by Pink floyd, he would buy me a guitar. I learned it, so he bought me the most beautiful cherry red ESP LTD guitar. I played day and night on that thing, learned a lot of songs that were meant for drop D tuning. Tool, Godsmack, System of a Down, Rob Zombie, Pink Floyd, Jimmie Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, all the good stuff.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Another incident around this period comes to me, I remember driving down the street with my mom when we were in a screaming match and she kicked me out of the car. I was right by the Marsh I used to go to with her, which was now closing it’s doors. I had a friend of Bernard’s nearby, Nick. This wasn’t Nick Pasquarosa, who would be my highschool friend, it was a different Nick.

  I went to his door and told him and his mom what happened, and they took me in for a day or two. They were poor people put their doors were open, and when I mean poor, I mean poorer than me and my mom. We were on welfare, HUD, and food stamps, and we had food to eat. For dinner that night she cooked egg noodles in chicken broth, that’s it, no chicken, nothing else, and water to wash it down. Still though, I was happy and I was full. I was welcome, and I slept there until I meandered on back home eventually.

  I remember staying at Bernards sometimes as well, he had a crazy life. This middle schooler was already worried about accidentally knocking up girls, he was smoking weed, he was getting in fights all the time, it was a crazy place. His house was always open to me as well, and the same is true for Cornells.

  Cornell and Bernard made me tougher because they liked to fight, box, and wrestle. So naturally we had matches, and though I would usually lose, I got better at fighting and I had a stone wall for a mindset. It wasn’t as weak as before, and I knew you had to shut people up if they were talking trash about you. That part, and having people in my corner, was good for me.

  I think that about wraps up middle school, and next I can tell you about Dustin, and then transitioning into our next location which was near Franklin school again. This house was only a couple blocks from Kritian, Sevenz, and my grandparents house.

  Dustin Emmons.

  Dustin and my mom fought more than the previous guys. He looked exactly like the lead singer of the famous band Disturbed, except he was fat. He liked chewing tobacco, and I can’t remember what he did for a living. He lived with his two parents and his brother, and his brother lived in the basement and was a raging alcoholic. Dustin’s dad was a really nice guy, but his mom absolutely hated me for some reason. Dustin’s daughter was a simple minded girl who suffered from some sort of retardation, but she was nice. He didn’t have her but one day a month it seemed.

  Now the stage with Dustin was bad for me. I hate to even put this on paper. I was in my bedroom and I would hear them having intercourse, my mom would be screaming. I would cover my ears but it didn’t help. I would knock on the door and ask them to be quiet but she would just tell me to close my door or put headphones on. I can’t tell you how traumatizing this was, or how frequently my nights would be interrupted by this, or how I would cry myself to sleep because I just couldn’t take it anymore.

  I found myself saying “In the end, all you have is yourself.”

  One bastion of hope I had was the occasional trip to the skating rink. I was really good at skating, good enough to go to the skate park and hit the half pipe, the hip, grind, drop in, I could jump 360, skate backwards, I could even go in a straight line and continuously spin. However all the cool kids were bikers and they called me a “Fruit booter” , which is a hilarious name for it.

  Either way, at the skating rink my mom would drop me off and I would stay for hours. I had some friends there, and they had some activities too. The owner would host limbo, and the Macarena, even some overnight parties.

  The overnighters were really neat, you’d get there at 7 pm and stay till 6 am sometimes. There was dancing, giant dice games, races, pizza.

  The place was kind of run down to be honest, but everything in my home town was. So, the skating rink gave me the idea I needed to get rid of Dustin once and for all. Before we get there, I’ve a couple more things to wrap up at chase apartments.

  I still had my cat Shadow, and we briefly adopted a stray tuxedo cat named Halo. Now for some reason, and they were both male cats, shadow was trying to mount halo and do dirty things to him. Around the same time my mom bought a dog, Recees.

  Recees was a small papillon dog, basically a fluffy chihuahua. He was real dumb, as small dogs often are. My cats started peeing because of it and one day Halo mysteriously vanished. I’m told he ran away, but I’ll never know.

  Now there was a dog gate separating the kitchen from the rest of the house and one fateful day the dumb dog was trying to sneak under it and his head was stuck under the gate. I placed my hands on top of the gate to lift it up, and right as I was freeing the dog my mom walked around the corner.

  For some reason she assumed I was trying to push the gate down on the dogs neck and kill it. This is the furthest thing from the truth, the only animal I’d been mean to was frogs.

  She fabricated this whole story about how I wanted to kill her dog because of my cat not getting along with it. I got grounded from going anywhere, including the Fourth of July, outside, absolutely anything for over a month.

  I can also remember this vivid recurring nightmare happening around now as well. It was maybe the second or third time I had it. I’ve even had this same dream as an adult. It’s so jarring that it took me ten minutes or longer to bring myself back to reality once I woke up. Let me describe it.

  After drifting off to sleep I would be in a very clear area with a giant mountain ahead of me. It had a crack in it and a passage. I would be standing at a field far below it, but the mountain was large enough to block any sunlight from the other side. I felt very aware and lucid, aware of my body like I was actually there. This voice would come into my mind and it only conveyed that “it wasn’t enough” or “I wasn’t good enough” and that doesn’t sound scary, but this voice was one that shook my entire body, my bones, my mind. I would wake up covered in sweat head to toe, I would be shaking, sometimes I had been crying in my sleep. I remember getting out of bed and resting my hands on the window sill, looking out at the drainage ditch and trying to breathe normally. It shook me to my bones, it was true terror. I haven’t had this dream in about ten years time.

  When I was able to go outside again I went to the skatepark, and I took my sweater off. I forgot about it and left it there. I stopped going for a while and went back, there was no bathroom there and I asked the boys around where I could pee. They said oh, behind the ramp there’s a shirt we all piss on. I went back there and for an entire year my sweater had been hanging out back behind the ramps and it had been used as a urinal the whole time. I peed on it too, and I’m pretty sure it stayed there for at least another whole year.

  I saw Dan Height there, he was a legend around town for his insane stunts. Dan was a high schooler who could do backflips on his bike, he could do anything with it. When he showed up everyone just stood back and watched as he tackled every ramp there. What’s crazy is Dan had once failed a trick and smashed his forehead on the ground, and it shattered. He had a steel plate put in it’s place, and when he got into fights at school he would just headbut people and they would get knocked out cold. I saw him smack his head onto stoplight poles to prove his point, the dude was an animal.

  Bernard got into a fight with him when we were in high school, I can’t remember the outcome. I’ll mention more on Dan later.

  Middle school is nearly wrapped up, there just a couple more things to cover before high school. I started getting detention a lot and having to stay after school. I even got my first expulsion from school and sent to OSS or out of school suspension.

  So Cornell gave me a pornography magazine that he stole from his dad. I liked it, but I had no idea where to hide it from my mom. The irony of where I hid it is not lost on me. When aunt Lilly died I inherited two statues. They were about a foot tall, and follow. They were porcelain, one of Jesus and one of Mary. The Mary statue had a hole in the bottom and I would roll up the magazine and hide it inside.

  Well, I was kind of bored with it and I was friends with this girl at school who had suddenly become a lesbian after breaking up with a little twerp named Jamie. She wanted to buy my magazine and I was totally fine with that. I snuck it to school in my backpack and I sold it to her for $10. I didn’t think anything of it.

  The next day the principal called me into his office and slapped down the porno mag onto his desk and asked me what it was. I said, well, it’s a porno mag sir. He wasn’t too happy.

  He explained that Jessica (the girl I sold it to) had taken it home and got caught by her step mom, and she tattled on me about the whole situation. To appease her parents they kicked me out of school for a week. I thought I would get a week vacation but they just so happened to start sending expelled middle school students to the high schools program, OSS.

  My mom was very upset because there was no bus that would take you there, not to mention they had to call her into the office for the whole thing. Basically, it was some tiny building out by the fairgrounds in the country. There were students from 8th grade and up, all the way to seniors. I was the youngest student there.

  Lucky for me, the teacher wasn’t there yet when I arrived and the older kids there asked what I did. I told them, and they thought it was a noble deed, they kind of took me into their crowd and were nice to me. We basically just goofed off all week. One boy pretended to not be able to read so the teacher who was rather dim witted, believed him and gave him a picture book.

  While there on Friday, we messed with the clock two times. When she left the room we took the clock off the wall and turned the clock forward and hour and told her it was lunch time. She left for lunch, and when our our was up we turned the clock back. We got a whole extra hour of lunch and she was highly confused about the situation.

  I had numerous detentions for so many things I can’t remember. One time I got caught shoving another student and this teacher with crazy eyes made me “literally” push a wall for a half hour. She would always talk in a really high pitched voice, like she was extremely happy. This was weird because when she told us her dog died she said

  “My dog died yesterday!” But she was smiling ear to ear and saying it in that same tone that made everyone look at eacother like… what is wrong with her..

  Mr Martin was a notable figure at Columbia as well. He was a 500 pound giant man who taught us how to cut wood, weld desks back together, and build tiny houses. One assignment I built a tiny model house out of really tiny pieces of wood that was so strong, he stood on its roof and it did not collapse. This was his test for every house that we built. He instructed us that if he began to stink, we should draw a picture of a nose and slide it to him and he would go into his office for the rest of class. I can say this got abused a couple times when we didn’t want to do anything. He was a bit strange, he got in trouble twice. Once for a girl who was passing notes, she was wearing a skirt and he had her sit on the high stool with an actual dunce cap on for the class period. She accused him of peeking.

  Second, and I can’t remember what proceeded this, but he came up to me when I was getting out of my locked and going to lunch. He used his belly to bump into me and force me against the lockers. He said “Get in line Bingaman!” And he kept belly bumping me and I couldn’t escape, the vice principal opened his door which was right across from us and yelled for Mr Martin to come into his office. I have no clue why that happened, but it was weird. Then the rest of the school said Mr Martin was coming onto me, which made me really embarrassed about the whole thing and I just wanted to drop it.

  With those out of the way, we’re about to come to a junction where things take an even more dramatic path than I could have expected. In some ways it was good for me, though you won’t see why for a while.

  Before I end this letter let me explain how I got rid of Dustin once and for all.

  We had moved out of the apartments and to downtown, blocks away from my grandparents, Kristian, Sevenz, Alli, and Nick (the first one).

  At this apartment we rented the downstairs part of a house. It was pretty tiny, but it was more private than chase crossing. My mom could afford it because of her money from stripping every night.

  My first memory here is of Dustin and my mom screaming at each other. It sounded like crashing in the living room, I was scared. I ran out to look and he had her pinned down and she was trying to fight him off. I had tears in my eyes but I wasn’t going to take it anymore, I decided to fight. She slapped him in the face a few times while I grabbed a baseball bat. I started towards him and he lifted his head up to look at me, and I probably stood no chance. It worked though, he stood up and left.

  When he came back around one day soon after, my mom had left money on the table for some upcoming bills. I was due to go to the skating rink that night and I took it. It was about $150 . I went to the rink and bought admissions for my friends, pizza, games, everything I wanted. When I got back home I placed a $50 back on the table. My mom asked me if I’d seen what happened to the money and I said I had no idea. The next thing I knew, she was screaming at Dustin and accusing him of taking it. Once her mind was made up, it was over. There was no convincing her otherwise. Soon after that they broke up for good, and I never told her that it was me.

  Now, we begin our journey into high school, marking the last chapter while living with my mom. Once more, we'll move to a new location and meet a new man. The worst of them all, Steve.

  [Izriel's pen falls from his grasp, the name 'Steve' glaring up at him from the paper, a harbinger of memories he'd rather bury but must unveil. He gazes upward at the ceiling, now cloaked in the darkness of late night.

  “I can hear the wind calling.”

  He pushes back from the desk, his hand gliding over the wood, leaving the letter exposed, as if the paper itself could share in his moment of hesitation.

  Standing, he turns to the window, where the storm has descended upon the world outside. Rain falls in relentless sheets, drumming against the pavement in an erratic, almost sentient rhythm. The tree in the yard bows under the assault of the wind, its limbs casting off twigs that dance momentarily before disappearing into the tempest.

  His weary blue eyes watch the sky, where clouds churn with the promise of more thunder, a metaphor for the storms yet to come in his story.

  He inhales deeply, counting to four, and exhales sharply, steeling himself against the memories.

  “We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion~” he murmurs, the lyrics of a song that once cradled him through darker times.]