Associations - Cylindrical things

by Jennifer Bell-lang
(Grand Isle, Vt. USA)

Dysfunctional Childhood

Ok, it's early some morning and I'm in the mood to write. Well you haven't heard this part of my story yet and it's hard for me to bring it up because no one really wants to believe me but it did happen and I'll tell you it. When I was around ten years old and I was living in an apartment complex with my sister and my mother and after I had already begun to be sexually active I witnessed a pretty horrific scene that has left it hard for me to breathe some days. So here's how my mind remembers it.

Visual #1 - Yeah so we lived in an apartment complex and we had an outdoor pool I used to go swimming in a lot. One day I was coming out of pool using the stainless steel ladder when a white guy standing in the pool next to the ladder on my right tried to help me out but fondled me instead by sticking his finger up into me and moving it around. I remember holding so tight to the handles of that ladder and it imprinted a memory into my bones. I was afraid, very scared and grossed out at the same time.

Visual #2 - I'm sitting on the toilet in the downstairs bathroom and looking down at my crotch and notice my first dark hairs. It scared me in a way that it felt like the black fourth of july fire work snakes you light on the sidewalk and they grow into about a six inch thingy. Smelly, some sort of carbon and sulfur that leaves a black spot in the pavement when it's done burning.

Visual #3 - So, I'm walking out by my apartment one day and I hear these terrible screams coming from across the road. You see I had heard those screams before and I knew that fear, I knew that echo. I ran over to stop the screaming and to help. I was going to get them to stop. So I looked through the sliding glass doors and saw a neighbor on his hands and knees and my Uncle and this boy's father standing over him using some sort of violence on his backside. I was frienzed and looking around me for something to help and caught the light flash off a silver lead pipe, grabbed it and while I'm screaming I smash the glass on the door, dropped the pipe and ran home still screaming. I was found under my sisters bed, threating to put a fork in an electrical outlet and was brought be ambulance to a children's hospital in Connecticut. I remember the room I was put in had bars on the windows and I could see the lights of the city across the river.