I was cold. So cold. But I was always cold. The rough, freezing wood of my bedroom wall scraped along my back, along the bones that stuck out of my skin. I hadn’t eaten in… I couldn’t remember. I pressed my hands against my stomach. It kept making sounds, telling me it was hungry. But my poppa said I would be having no food. He wouldn’t feed the devil.
I was naked except for my underwear. My poppa said sinners like me didn’t wear clothes. He said that the evil inside my veins was warm enough. I didn’t want to be evil. I didn’t mean to be, but my poppa told me I was anyway. That’s why other kids didn’t want to play with me, because they saw the blackness in my damned soul.
I looked down at my arms and chest. They were covered in snake bite marks. I felt even colder as I thought of the snakes, of their teeth sinking into my flesh, commanded by Pastor Hughes to try to make me clean. But it wasn’t working. Nothing was working. I was too steeped in sin. Irredeemable, Poppa said. I didn’t know what irredeemable meant, but it sounded bad.
I closed my eyes, but all I saw was poppa earlier tonight, staggering toward me as I sat in the corner of my bedroom. I had no furniture in here. Poppa had removed my bed weeks ago, so I slept on the floor. I had no blankets, no pillow. He said I didn’t deserve them.
The door to my bedroom slammed open. I could smell the alcohol on my poppa’s breath from across the room. He took off his belt. I had only a second to curl into a ball before the leather cracked loudly across my back. I gritted my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut. I knew I deserved this because I was evil. Because I had flames running through my blood. But it still hurt me…
My poppa hit me until I couldn’t feel the pain. But I wanted the pain. I wanted the devil to leave me alone. Poppa grabbed my hair and pulled me to my feet. I didn’t cry out. The back of his hand sliced across my face, and I tasted blood. “Look at yourself,” he slurred, yanking on my hair until I looked up. I saw myself in the dirty mirror on the wall. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see my face. The devil’s face. “I said look, cunt!” my poppa screamed, and I opened my eyes.
Poppa smiled. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand why people smiled or why they frowned. I didn’t understand anything. People confused me. I didn’t know how to be around them or speak to them without scaring them away.
My poppa hated that about me most.
“Retard.” He squeezed my cheeks until the blood from his slap ran down my chin. I breathed out in relief. The escaping blood would help take away the flames. I needed to bleed to be saved.
Poppa reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen. Tipping back my head, he began to draw on my forehead. My eyes watered. When he’d finished with my forehead, he moved to my back, my chest, my arms, then he put his mouth to my ear. “Retard.” His harsh voice made me shake. He prodded the tip of his finger into the word on my head. “Motherfucking retard!”
I didn’t know what that word meant either. I knew it was bad. Some of the kids I used to try to play with would call me it. My poppa always called me it.
“Get in the corner of the room and don’t move,” Poppa ordered. I heard him leave the house, heard his footsteps on the gravel path outside. I wrapped my arms around my legs. “Go,” I whispered to the fire in my veins. “Just leave me. Make him love me again. Make the flames in my blood go away.”
God didn’t care for me. I was the devil’s child now. That’s what Pastor Hughes kept saying. I froze when I heard my mama in the living room singing. Mama had had another baby. I had a brother. Isaiah. I hadn’t seen him yet. Poppa hadn’t let me out of the room to meet him.
I listened as my mama sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” When she sang, I didn’t feel the flames in my blood. I didn’t feel the demons in my soul or the devil watching me.