Feature Writer: Dorothy Allison /
Feature Title: Private Rituals /
Story Codes: Mgg, Masturbation, First Time, Young /
Private Rituals
I was about eight or so when I discovered that my little sister, Reese, was masturbating almost as often as I was. In the middle of the night, I woke up to feel the bed shaking slightly, the big bed where the two of us slept. Instead of sprawling across the bottom of the bed as she usually did with her legs and arms thrown wide, Reese was pulled over to the far edge of the mattress, her body taut and curved away from me. I could hear the sound of her breathing, fast and shallow.
I knew immediately what she was doing. I kept still, listening, my own breathing quiet and steady. After a while there was a moment when she held her breath and then the shaking stopped. Very quietly then I slipped my right hand down between my legs and held myself, thinking about what she had been doing. I wanted to do it too, though I couldn’t stand the thought that she might hear. But what if she did? What could she say to me after doing it herself? I held my breath, I moved my hand, I almost did not shake the bed at all.
Reese would go back to our bedroom alone every afternoon after we came home from school. When she would come out, I would go in there. Sometimes I even imagined I could smell what she had been doing, but that could not have been so. We were little girls. We smelled like little girls. I pulled my shorts down and made sure of it, carefully washing between my legs with warm soap and water every time I did that thing I knew my little sister was doing too.
One afternoon, I went outside and stood under the bedroom window, listening for the sound of Reese alone in the bedroom. She was quiet, very quiet, but I could hear the rhythm of her breathing as it slowly picked up speed and the soft little grunts she made before it began to slow down again.
I liked those grunts. When Reese did it in the middle of the night, she never made any sound at all. But then I was just as careful myself, not letting myself make a sound even when I was safely alone. I wondered if Reese did it differently in the daytime. I wondered if she lay on her back with her legs wide, the way I liked to when I was alone, rather than on her stomach with both hands under her the way she did at night.
There was no way I could spy on her to see, no way I could know. But I imagined Reese sometimes while I did it myself, seeing her as she lay across our big bed, rocking only slightly, showing by nothing but her breathing that she was committing a sin.
Reese and I never talked about our private games, our separate hours alone in our room, but then we never let anyone else go in the bedroom when one of us was in there alone.
My stepfather, Daddy Glen, married my mother when I was four and Reese was still running around in rubber pants. He never spanked us that first year, never even raised his voice to yell at us. He touched my mama like she was something fine and fragile, touched us as if we wore the shine of her on our baby skin.
But by the time I was five he started beating me, spanking Reese, but beating me, and screaming all the time. He still stared at Mama as if she were something marvelous and strange, and handled Reese carefully, shaking her so that her loose blond hair flew back and forth but never slapping her.
Reese looked exactly like mama’s child, with mama’s eyes, mama’s chin, and her sunshine-streaked curls, but she had a sweet-natured passivity that was totally unlike Mama or me. I was Mama’s firstborn and her favorite-smart, dark, sharp-featured and too often cuddled up close to Mama’s side.
“He’s jealous of that child,” my aunts warned Mama.” A man grown and he’s as jealous of that child as if she were a lover.”
I think I was five when I started masturbating. At least I can vaguely remember doing so. What I clearly remember are the daydreams of fire that accompanied doing it, being tied up and put inside a haystack while someone set fire to the dry, stale straw.
I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure that I came when the fire reached me, or if I would come, and then imagine escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.
I’m not sure when I got the science kit. I think it belonged to Daddy Glen’s brother’s children and I actually only got part of it. But I got the important part, the set of three glass test tubes in their little rack. Cold glass tubes, crystalline and gleaming and dangerous. What might happen if you pushed them inside you? What if they broke?
I pushed one inside myself.
In and out. Gradually it became warm.
I pushed the tube at my asshole and told myself it was going to hurt terribly when I actually shoved it in. When I heard myself say that out loud “It’s going in” I came so hard I thought I’d broken it. Terrified, I hid all of them and ran outside. It was the first time I hid something, but not the last.
I made up stories for myself, changed some of them a little and told them to Reese and my cousins. I was very popular for those stories though my Aunt Raylene got upset when she heard some of them. If she had heard them all she would have beaten me harder than Daddy Glen.
I would tell stories in which boys and girls were gruesomely raped and murdered, in which babies were cooked up in pots of boiling beans, stories about vampires and soldiers and long razor-sharp knives. Witches cut off the heads of both children and grown-ups.
Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people’s houses. I was very popular as a babysitter, the children were always quiet and well behaved while I whispered my stories, their eyes fixed on my face in such a way they made me feel like one of my own witches casting a spell.
I walked in on Reese one afternoon while she was lying on the bed with a pair of mama’s panties pulled over her face. All of her features were outlined under the sheer material but her breath puffed the silk out over her lips. Frantically, she snatched them off and shoved them behind her on the bed. I grabbed up a book I had been reading from the dresser, and pretended I hadn’t seen anything.
Reese played out her stories in the woods behind our house. I watched her one afternoon from the top of the tree Mama hung her bird feeder on. Reese hadn’t seen me climb up there and didn’t know I had a clear view of her as she ran around wearing an old sheet tied to her neck as a cape.
It looked like she was fighting off imaginary attackers. Then she dropped to the ground and began rolling around in the grass and wet leaves, shouting, “NO! NO!” The haughty expression on her face was replaced by mock terror, and she threw her head back and forth wildly like the heroine in an adventure movie.
I laughed, hugged myself tightly to the tree and rocked my hips against the trunk. I imagined I was tied to the branches above and below me. Someone had beaten me with dry sticks and put their hands in my clothes.
Someone, someone, I imagined. Someone had tied me high up in the tree, gagged me and left me to starve to death while the blackbirds pecked at my ears. I rocked and rocked, pushing my thighs into the rough bark. Below me, Reese pushed her hips into the leaves and made those grunting noises. Someone, someone she imagined, was doing terrible, exciting things to her.
When I was nine, determined to finally have some privacy, I moved myself and all my stuff out into the utility room, setting up Mama’s old fold-up bed next to the washing machine. The latch I had put on the door made it possible for me to play the game I had dreamed about for so long. I started tying myself up, using scraps of clothesline and worn belts.
I would spread my legs wide and use rope that I had already tied to the bed frame to pin my ankles. I fastened clothesline to the top of the bed and I wrapped the rope around my wrists, pretending I was tied down. The stories I made up while lying like that were so exciting, I felt as if they made me drunk. After a while I would free one hand and slip it down between my legs to play with myself.
It was a sin what I did alone in there. I was a sinner, a bad person. I told myself I would have to stop doing those things, that sooner or later someone might catch me, and then what would happen? Everyone would know. But maybe, secretly, everyone did the same thing, like Reese behind the closed bedroom door. Maybe everyone was committing the same sin, secretly, fearfully. I looked in people’s eyes to try and see if something showed. “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” the preacher intoned. Yes, I thought, probably so.
I don’t think Reese ever tied herself up, but I’m not completely sure.
My uncles were big men with wide shoulders, broken teeth and sunken features. They kept dogs trained for hunting and drove old trucks with metal toolboxes bolted to the reinforced wooden sides. They worked in the mills or at the furnace repair business, or sometimes did roofing or construction work, depending on how the industry was going.
They did engine work together on the weekends, standing around in the yard sipping whiskey and talking dirty, and kicking at the greasy remains of engines they never finished rebuilding. Their eyes were narrow under sun-bleached eyebrows, and their hands were forever working a blade, or a piece of wood, or oiling some little machine part or other.
“You hold a knife like this,” they told me. “You work a screwdriver from your shoulder, swing a hammer from your hip, and spread your fingers when you want to hold something safe.”
I worshiped my uncles; Uncle Earle, Uncle Lucius, Wade and Butch and Bo. I begged my aunts for their old worn shirts so I could wear them just the way they did, with the front tucked in my shorts and the back tail hanging out. My uncles laughed at me, but affectionately.
They raked their callused fingers through my short black hair and played at catching my shirttail as I ran past them, but their hands never hurt me and their pride in me was as bright as the coals on the cigarettes that were always held loosely between their fingers. I followed them around and stole things from them that they didn’t really care about old tools, pieces of chain and broken engine parts.
I wanted most of all a knife like the ones they all carried a buck knife with a brass and stained wood handle or a jackknife decorated with mother-of-pearl. I found a broken jackknife with a shattered handle that I taped back together around the bent steel tang. I carried that knife all the time until my cousin Grey took pity and gave me a better one.
One summer afternoon, I found a broken length of chain from off the tailgate of one of the trucks. I cleaned and polished it and locked it around my hips. Sometimes when I masturbated I would push the links up inside me. I had read in one of Daddy Glen’s paperbacks about women who did something like that.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I collected various sizes of chain for it. It took me a long time, however, to learn to run that chain between my labia so that it rubbed from my vagina to my asshole, and the links pulled up tight to press my clit as I moved. But the first time I did it, that chain was sun-warmed and tingly against my little girl’s boyish thighs, as shiny as the sweat on my uncle’s freckled shoulders, and as exciting as the burning light behind their eyes.
Every link on that chain was magic in my hand.
I became ashamed of myself for the things I thought about when I put my hands between my legs, more ashamed for masturbating to the fantasy of being beaten than for being beaten in the first place. I lived in a world of shame. I hid my bruises as if they were evidence of crimes I had committed.
I knew I was a sick, disgusting person. I couldn’t stop my stepfather from beating me, but I was the one who masturbated. I did that, and how could I explain to anyone that I hated his beating me, hated being beaten, but still masturbated to the story I told myself about being beaten? I was a child. I could not explain anything.
Sometimes, I imagined people watching while Daddy Glen beat me. I imagined this only when it was not happening. The times when he actually beat me, I screamed and kicked and cried like the baby I was. But sometimes when I was safe and alone, I would imagine him beating me, and then I would imagine the ones who watched.
Someone had to watch – some girl I admired who barely knew I existed, some girl from church or down the street, or one of my cousins, or even somebody I had seen on TV. Sometimes a whole group of them would he trapped into having to watch – they couldn’t help or get away.
They had to watch. In my imagination I was proud and defiant. I’d stare back at Daddy Glen in outrage with my teeth set, making no sound at all, no shameful scream, no begging, no crying. Those who watched admired me and hated him. I imagined it that way and put my hands between my legs. It was scary to think that way, but it was wonderful too. The girl’s face that watched me, loved me. It was as if I were being beaten for her. I was someone wonderful in her eyes.
I lived a completely schizophrenic life. I was just about the best little girl in South Carolina, made straight A’s at school, took care of my little sister, cleaned the house so Mama wouldn’t have to worry, told lies to the bill collectors that came to the door, and went to Baptist Sunday School in clean white dresses.
But I was a sinner.
I knew I was a sinner. I kept switching to different churches every few months, while pretending that I was struggling over whether to take Jesus into my heart. My mama finally caught on to the game I was playing and had me baptized. Church wasn’t any fun at all when no one was trying to save your soul, so I quit going after a while.
I stole laxatives out of the medicine chest and swallowed them in large quantities to punish myself. But I couldn’t stop telling myself those stories. Instead I promised Jesus I wouldn’t put my hands between my legs anymore. I curled my hands up close to my neck. I gritted my teeth and wore thick cotton panties. I even started going to sleep with my arms stretched wide as if tied to the bed frame. In my imagination they were. It was a way not to sin.
Jesus, help me not to sin, I prayed. It was a joke on Jesus and me that I started having orgasms in that position, arms wide out, not touching myself, the movie playing in my head working more efficiently than my fingers ever had.
My favorite of all my uncles was Uncle Earle, known as Black Earle for three counties around. Mama said he was called Black Earle for that black, black hair that fell over his eyes in a great soft curl, but my Aunt Raylene said he was known for his black, black heart.
Black Earle Boatwright was a pretty man, pretty and soft-spoken and hardworking. He always had money in his pockets, a job he was just leaving and another one he was about to take up. He always had some tender young girl on his arm – some seventeen year-old child who watched him like his spine was outlined in pearls and rubies, his teeth with diamonds brighter than the highlights in his shiny black hair.
He’d had a wife when he was young, a Catholic wife and three daughters, but she had left him for his running around, and since then he’d made a career of it, taking up with a new young girl every year or so – always young enough to boast about and as madly in love with him as only a young girl could be.
He married them, each of them, in a courthouse wedding over the line into Georgia or North Carolina after getting them to swear they were of legal age. “It’s a sin,” my aunts declared.
“He’s never divorced a one.”
And he didn’t. He stayed married to them as if the marriages were more than the law or men could understand, as if that piece of worthless paper had meaning only he and they could put on it.
“Why do you bother?” Mama asked him after he brought the fifth or sixth of his young brides to stay with us for a week.
“Because they want it so bad,” he told her where I could hear. “It seems like the least I can do.”
I loved my Uncle Earle absolutely, so I decided all those girls were lucky to have had any kind of marriage at all and too stupid to deserve pity anyway. Besides, he always brought them to stay with us sooner or later, and I would find a way to plant myself up against the bedroom door while he honeymooned loudly on the other side.
“That’s sex,” I told myself. “They’re having sex in there.”
I hugged myself and listened for every girl’s gasp, every thud of my uncle’s body against the bed. It had to be something good if they both wanted it so bad.
I became very very afraid someone would find out the kind of stories I was making up for myself. Because of the fear, I stopped telling my stories to other people, except for rare and special girlfriends who first had to win my trust by telling me something scary about themselves. I knew that people would think it strange that there were no boys in my stories, no men. Probably it too was some kind of sin, the kind of sin people locked you away to purge.
My stories became more detailed, more violent and more complicated. The world I was creating in my mind was full of violence and sex. It was dangerous and terrible, the women in it powerful and cruel. Sometimes those women would even bring in men to beat and fuck me.
Then again, sometimes I would be captured by evil men, tortured for my bravery and then rescued by beautiful women who wrapped me around with their great strong arms. That world was both complicated and simple, a place of dreams, adventure, sex and ritual. I was thankful that no one knew what hid behind my carefully blank or smiling face.
Once or twice a week, regularly as Sunday School, Daddy Glen beat me with one of the same two or three belts he’d set aside just for me. Oiled, smooth and supple as the gristle under chicken fat, those belts hung behind the door of his closet where I could see them when I helped Mama put away his clothes.
I would reach up and touch the leather, feel it warm under my palms. There was no magic in it, no mystery, but those belts smelled of him and made me grit my teeth. Sometimes I would make myself go in that closet and wrap my fingers around those belts as if they were something animal that could be tamed.
It was only in my secret stories that I was able to defy Daddy Glen. Only there that I had any pride. I loved those fantasies, even though I was sure they were a terrible thing. They had to be; they were self-centered and made me have shuddering orgasms. In the fantasy, I was very special. I was triumphant, important. I was not ashamed.
I learned to push a hairbrush handle inside my vagina to masturbate. I pretended someone else was doing it. I wore a belt fastened very tightly around my waist under my clothes where no one could see. I pretended that someone else had put it there and I couldn’t take it off.
I enjoyed my other world so much that I began to live in it, plotting it out like a movie in my head, escaping to it whenever I could no longer stand the real life I did not want to be living at all.
Uncle Earle came to stay with us after a construction accident, hobbling around on a cane. I found excuses to spend time with him and get him to tell me stories. He told Mama that all the girls loved him because he looked like Elvis Presley, only skinny and with muscles. In a way he did, but his face was etched with lines and sunburned a deep red-brown.
The truth was he had none of Elvis Presley’s baby-faced innocence; he had a devilish look to his face and a body Aunt Carr swore was made for sex. He was a big man with a long, lanky body and wide hands seamed with scars.
“Earle looks like trouble coming in on greased skids,” my Uncle Bo laughed.
All the aunts agreed, their cheeks wrinkling around indulgent ‘smiles while their fingers trailed across Uncle Earle’s big shoulders as sweetly and tenderly as the threadlike feet of hummingbirds.
When Uncle Earle talked, I made my eyes wide, so he would think I believed his stories. I laughed at his jokes, even the ones I didn’t understand. He would take me riding in his Pontiac with the top down, riding around dirt roads kicking up clouds of dust. He drank whiskey out of a pint bottle and let me sip a little.
I would giggle and fall against him, pretending I was dizzier than I really was. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to smell him up close. His voice would get deeper after I fell against him, and he would tell me to sit up straight, that we had to get home. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to feel the muscles in his shoulders. Behind his sideburns and below his ears, the skin of his neck was as soft as if he were a woman. It took a lot of gentle persistence before he would sit still so that I could touch him when I wanted.
He gave me dollar bills for letting him rub against my backside, something I was happy to do. I wanted to turn around and pull his shirt up so I could smell his belly. But he would get nervous if I touched him too much and he got angry the one time I tried to take my pants down so he could see.
I felt guilty then, and angry at him.
One day when we were out in the country all alone, I pretended to be afraid and ran away from him. I walked around in the heat under the pine trees, imagining a secret installation built under the ground and the mutated, grotesque creatures who lived there. I lay down and looked up blindly into the sunlight. I began to play with myself, rubbing against the pine cones scattered around. A smoky dust came off the dried cones when I rubbed them together, a bitter dust that hung in the slanting sunlight and made me squint. I pushed some of the pine cones down in my pedal pushers before I heard my uncle coming, and quickly sat up.
Uncle Earle didn’t say anything. He just sat down beside me and offered me some warm Coke. I could taste the whiskey in it. He told me I was going to be a beautiful woman. I was gonna drive men wild. He rubbed my neck and shoulders and breasts and told me he would never hurt me. Then he got me to roll over and lay down on my belly. His long body came down on top of me, smelling the cigarette smoke and hair grease. My chin was pressed into the pine needles and dirt.
His chest was heavy on the back of my neck. I could feel his cock against my ass, steadily rocking against me. Every time he came down the pine cones in my pants ground into me. They were rough and scratchy but felt good to me. I began to rock with him, squirming to push the pine cones around.
I got so excited that he must have gotten scared. When he came, he jumped up and ran back toward the car. I ignored him and reached into my pants to shove the pine cones farther down until they were pushing at my labia. I told myself I was going to shove them up inside me, with the dirt and the grass. I came so hard I peed myself.
It took me a long time to get up the nerve to go back to the car. I wanted to tell my uncle that I had been dreaming about him for years, that I had wanted him to do more than what he had done. But I was afraid to say anything. Uncle Earle didn’t say anything either. He poured his little bottle of whiskey out the window onto the dry ground.
His face looked shadowy and scared, with the shock of his hair hanging limp over his eyes. He never took me out driving again, and his eyes would slide away from me when I watched him across my mama’s dinner table. When I came up behind him on the porch and hooked my fingers in his belt, he jerked my hands out roughly and pulled away from me.
“Ain’t gonna touch you,” he muttered.
I didn’t really know if I wanted him to, but I think I did.
Masturbation for me was a mystery, private and terrible, desperate and glorious. Knowing that my sister did it too helped me to believe that I was not alone. Listening to my Uncle Earle with his teenage lovers made me think sex might be worth the price you had to pay for it. Listening to ms parents fucking in the night convinced me that it was an inevitable sin.
Listening to my aunts’ jokes about men and their ways taught me that sex was also a subject of great humor and bitter enjoyment. But still, I believed that what I did was somehow different from anything anyone else had ever done. Maybe it was because Daddy Glen was fucking me. Maybe it was because on some level I could make myself forget that was happening and go on as if life were normal, as if we were just like everyone else.
When I thought about how different I was, it seemed to me that my difference lay in the things I thought that no one else imagined. The things I dreamed of doing with my life, the stories I made up for myself were clearly something I had to keep secret and protect. In my stories, women did things that I knew they were not supposed to do.
Then, carried knives and rode motorcycles and spat in the faces of those that dared to touch them. I played an incredibly complicated game with every book I read, every movie or TV show I saw; I turned it over in my mind. The heroes and active characters became female while the men receded to a vague blur, not really interesting at all. The stories I made up, in which I was captured and tortured to save my girlfriends – the ones I used so successfully to bring myself to orgasm – they were only the smallest piece of what was scary and dangerous about me.
Finally, I told. One night late while she was babysitting us, I told Cousin Temple that Daddy Glen had “done things” to me. She climbed out of the bed and ran down the hall. When she came back she had a little comic book with cartoon drawings of men lying on top of women, pushing their dicks between the women’s legs.
“Did he do that?” she asked me.
Temple’s eyes were pale, pale blue, burning.
“No,” I whispered. “He does it with me standing up.”
Early the next morning my uncles all stomped in the back door, their faces flat, red, and dangerous. Temple had told the whole damn world. My uncles took Daddy Glen away and beat him up, the same way they had when I was six and he had whipped me so badly that Aunt Raylene had seen the marks. Mama moved us out to a motel. But after a few weeks, Daddy Glen came over to the motel and cried in Mama’s arms until she forgave him.
I understood that we had to go back to live with him. I understood that Mama loved him. We went home on a Sunday afternoon and he had a big basket of take-out chicken waiting for dinner. I went for a long walk and kept making up stories for myself, talking out all the roles as I walked for hours.
When I went home, Mama had gone to bed exhausted. Daddy Glen was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the screen, his hands loose on the oilcloth, cigarettes spilling out of a saucer. His blue-black eyes were mirrors in his pale face. I say myself in his pupils, my own face brown and empty, my own eyes shining like wet glass, reflecting nothing.
I invented a series of new tests and rituals for myself. I put things in my pants and made rules for how long I had to keep them there – pine cones, rocks, a letter opener I stole from the library whose handle I gripped with my buttocks, little ceramic figures from my aunt’s dresser.
I added details to my fantasy world, pretending I was required to carry messages tucked in locked containers that the enemies would try to steal from me. I experimented with actually pushing things up inside me. My test tubes were long lost. I graduated to screwdriver handles, my mama’s potato masher, various vegetables and most of the tools in my stepfather’s tool case.
My uncle had left his cane. It was blond wood with a knobby top about the size of a closed fist. I discovered that if I put it between my legs it was just about a half inch higher than my cunt. I tied a clean washcloth over the head of it and used masking tape and rope to fasten it between my legs.
I walked back and forth with it riding high up against my clit, stumbling painfully. I made myself promise that I would walk back and forth across the room ten times before I could stop. Even if I should come, I promised, I would not let myself stop. When I actually did come and could not finish the required laps, I made a vow that I would have to do it all over again, and double the number of times I would have to cross the room.
Doubled again and again, no matter how I sweated and limped, riding that cane like a wooden horse on a merry-go-round, I never caught up, never met my vow. Expiation was impossible. Sin was endless.
I was thirteen. Uncle Earle had moved to Florida. I was rummaging through the house, restless, irritable, looking for something new. In my sister’s room, I started opening drawers, pulling out boxes, looking through her things. In Reese’s bottom drawer there was a box with a cord tied around it in a complicated series of knots. Slowly I picked it apart, keeping the pattern of the knots in mind so I could tie it back together the way it had been.
The process took a long time and calmed me down. When I had it completely untied, I sat still for a moment with the box in my lap. I could hear a lawn mower in the distance, a radio, and someone yelling. I opened the box. Silk panties, an old pair of my mama’s. I lifted them carefully. Underneath was one of Daddy Glen’s handkerchiefs, loosely wrapping a long smooth ivory handle that looked as if it had once been fixed to a mirror.
It fit my hand solidly and felt almost soft, so cool and yellowed as if it had absorbed years of sweet oil. I lifted it to my mouth wanting to run my tongue over it, but the smell stopped me. I knew that smell. It was my smell, girl smell, sex smell, heady yeast and piss smell. I breathed deeply and grinned, put that handle in my mouth.
“Little sister.” I giggled. “Little sister…”
I sucked the handle into my mouth, pushed my fingers down in my jeans for a little of the juice from between my legs. Carefully I rubbed it into the ivory before wrapping it back up and tying the knots all over again.
“Little sister.”
I kept laughing, almost singing.
“Little sister, just like me!”
It was true then. All of us hid the same thing behind our eyes. I went and got my chain, locked it around my hips, took my uncle’s knobby-headed cane and ran out into the thick summer heat. My stepfather was unloading boxes out of Mama’s gray Chevy. My Uncle Wade was helping him.
“Come on over here,” they yelled at me.
I planted that cane in the damp grass in front of me, and stood rock still, rock steady, memory rolling up like an endless, powerful story. Fire behind my eyes, light and shine, chain in the dark, whiskey taste beneath the Coke, my little sister’s face through the back window of the car, Daddy Glen’s forearms ridged in muscle, my uncle’s eyes narrowed under thick brows.
I put my head back and smiled.
The chain on my hips moved under my jeans. I was locked away and safe. What I really was could not he touched. What I really wanted was not yet imagined. I looked down at my hands on my uncle’s cane, remembering the fear and excitement in his eyes. Somewhere far away a child was screaming, but right then, it was not me…
THE END