Please stop hitting us father, it hurts, please...
My pleadings as always don't work, in fact it only seems to add more to his anger, it's like he hates just the fact that we, his children are breathing. Me, my older sister who always gets the least of the hits, maybe he does have a soul or perhaps he is thoughtful towards her since she is weaker than me and my brother who is also older than both of us.
My sister used to be very ill since birth so by default remains my brother and myself alongside our mother who gets the worst.
Tonight my father came back home from work wasted, like all the weekdays, our worst enemy is the bar situated between the buss stop and our house, he, as always meets his buddies there and starts drinking alcohol with them but as soon as he gets home, he seeks troubles, never satisfied with any of us, complaining about the food's taste or the way we are dressed and how my mother is dressed thinking she has another man when in fact it is he who has a mistress who he occasionally meets with no shame, acting like he has no family.
Once I went to buy candy from the store she and her husband owned and I surprised my father kissing her, they definitely didn't expect to see me there at exactly that time but after the initial shock they had with my sudden presence, he had the guts to smirk at my face, his own daughter and saying
"wait my nosy little devil until I get home"
You don't want to imagine the horrifying beating using his precious big leather belt which he proudly used to call Jeronimo. That belt had a buckle made of iron with a carved face of an Indian man often seen in old Western movies, like one of those native Indians with feathers attached to their hair. Oh, how i hated that belt, maybe more than I hated him.
I tried once to hide the damn belt.... Well big mistake from my part, because he would look for it everywhere and then make us look for it for hours, I had to eventually bring it forward since he was starting to really loose his patience with us, it is not worth mentioning what happened next when he figured it was me who had hidden it.
His job, it's funny how it was actually about defending children, most of them abandoned. It was a mistery to me the fact that he was capable to protect other people's sons and daughters but on the other hand he tortured his own, I could never understand his way of thinking, why he hated us so much, what did we ever do wrong to him or maybe it was the liquor to blame, heck.... who am I kidding because he just resented us, all of us, my brother Xavier, my sister Elaine and even my mother who was afraid to take us and run away, maybe I was too young to understand things since I was only 7 years old while my sister was 9 and my brother was already 11. My brother was the luckiest of us all since he lived with my grandparents in another city because he went to school where they lived. So in the end it was only me and my sister and because my sister was weak, it remained my mother and I. Imagine a 7 year old girl being terrified of her own father.
Today is finally Friday which means my brother comes home for the weekend and also a 2 days pause since my father doesn't work on weekends so he won't go to the bar to get wasted although he will send my brother to buy him alcohol, still it's not the same because when he drinks at home usually is calmer with the condition to not piss him of, we have to stay still like little soldiers in front of him ready to take orders like our lives depend on it but let's not forget that it's still Friday and work day for him.