My House of Pain: The Devil You Don't Know

Broken promises hung in the air like stale cigarette smoke, clinging to every goddamn memory of Zoe's fractured childhood. She was long a smoker. 2 packs a day in her adult life. Virginia Slims or Dunhill Slims. Her fingers were permanently stained a sickly yellow-brown, the same color as the ceiling in her one-bedroom apartment. She'd light up first thing in the morning, nicotine rushing through her bloodstream before her feet even hit the cold floor. The ritual of it—the flick of the lighter, the deep inhale, the burn in her lungs—was the only goddamn consistency in her chaos-filled life.

Born into a pressure cooker of dysfunction, she emerged from Helen and Charles' toxic union like a razor-sharp shard of broken glass - beautiful, dangerous, and impossibly sharp. The fights between her parents were legendary in their time—screaming matches that would shake the thin walls of their small cottage, Helen’s tears and Charles' thunderous fists creating the soundtrack of Zoe's earliest memories. I never saw them, but I heard stories. Helen would talk about them when the days were over, and the night was setting upon the drab kitchen of her home. But never would Helen malign my grandfather, or his choices. She just was not that woman. I longed to be that woman.

Thirteen years old when her father Charles stumbled out the door for the last time - a walking scotch bottle, more liquid than man - Zoe watched the implosion of her family like a cold-eyed witness to a slow-motion car crash. That night, rain pounded against the windows like it was trying to break in, and Charles could barely stand upright. His words slurred together, a drunken artist painting obscenities in the air. "You're nothing," he spat at Helen, fumes filling the room. "Never were shit, never will be." He didn't even look at Zoe as he walked out.

Helen, left alone, was a beautician who prettied up other women while her own life bled out in quiet desperation. After he left, she took on any and all work she could, coming home with feet swollen like water balloons and hands cracked from chemicals. She'd slump at the kitchen table, counting out bills with trembling fingers, cigarette dangling from her lips, ash occasionally falling onto the overdue notices.

Cheating wasn't just a hobby for Zoe - it was an art form. She'd steal from family, from friends, from strangers, then spin tales so intricate they'd make a spider's web look like a child's crayon drawing. And when caught? She'd transform herself into the victim, a magic trick of manipulation that would make Houdini weep with professional jealousy.

The moment Zoe locked eyes with her future child's father, seduction morphed into something darker - a goddamn war strategy with flesh as the battlefield. Condoms? Fucking useless against her raw determination. She punctured them with the same calculated precision she'd later use to puncture his soul - tiny pinpricks that leaked more than just latex protection. Each hole a deliberate act of sabotage, each deception a stepping stone toward her endgame: a child who would become her next obsession, her next project, her next potential victim.

And that is how it was for a while.

My father had a magical way about himself - always curious, visceral, and pure. He gifted me with a single powerful permission: "You can touch anything in the house with just one finger." This seemingly small allowance felt like a fucking revolution to my three-year-old self, a rebellion against the mesh walls of my playpen and all the boundaries already closing in around me. From inside my fabric prison, I'd extend that privileged index finger like a tiny explorer while my teddy cellmate watched with its dead button eyes, the shitty 70s gold shag carpet scratching my knees raw beneath us.

When freed, I transformed the kitchen into my laboratory, moving with deliberate precision while adults rushed around me. Metal pots reflected my face in warped fragments—the only mirrors that ever seemed to get it right. My single authorized finger—my passport to discovery—traced pan rims and countertops, feeling every curve and texture, sending electric shivers up my arm as I sought something to explain the discord humming in my bones. "Look how careful," my mother would say, completely missing the point. It wasn't carefulness driving my single-finger touch—it was pure fucking reverence, it was survival, it was obeying their rules while secretly feeding the rebel soul inside me.

That single-finger permission became my first lesson in boundaries—how to exist within constraints while still seeking truth. One finger—one small point of contact between who they thought I was and who I knew myself to be. One digit's worth of freedom that somehow kept me sane through decades of waiting to finally touch my real life with my entire being, no permission needed.

By the time I turned five, any whisper of love had long since rotted away like meat left in summer heat. The stench of their hatred filled every corner of our home. Her relationship wasn't just failing - it was a bloody battlefield where casualties weren't counted in bodies but in the salt of tears, in the raw-throat pain of midnight screams, in the soul-crushing collateral damage of a child forced to witness two people who should have protected each other instead rip into emotional flesh with words sharper than any knife.

Zoe was a fucking hurricane of human complexity - devastating, unpredictable, leaving nothing untouched in her path. Born from the festering wounds of generational trauma, she wore her damage like armor, both perpetrator and victim trapped in the same broken skin. She was a living, breathing cycle of pain that refused to be broken, a tornado of contradictions that could cradle you tenderly one moment and slice you open the next. Her love and hate were conjoined twins, impossible to separate, both equally terrifying in their intensity.

At night, I'd watch her through cracked doorways, her silhouette hunched and trembling, and wonder which version of my mother would greet me in the morning - the one whose fingers would gently brush my hair, or the one whose hands would clench into fists at the slightest provocation. The uncertainty gnawed at my insides like hungry rats.

The years that followed were a fucking wasteland. Our home reeked of desperation – a musty, choking cloud that clung to every thread of the piss-yellow curtains that hung limply in windows that never seemed to let in enough goddamn light. The walls themselves seemed to sweat with misery, yellowed and peeling like the skin of someone dying slowly of some unnamed disease. That rough-textured carpet – burnt orange and matted with years of spilled drinks and crushed food – scratched against tiny knees as her kid crawled across it, the friction leaving raw, red patches on soft skin.

The living room was a museum of broken dreams – a stone fireplace that never got cleaned, brass accents tarnished to a sickly green, reflecting the decay that infected everything in that house. Cheap plywood furniture with chipped veneer edges sharp enough to draw blood sat haphazardly around the room like abandoned sentinels. The kid would sprawl across that scratchy carpet with picture books and toys – small islands of color in an otherwise soul-crushing landscape – desperately trying to escape into worlds brighter than this one.

As her child, I learned to navigate the minefield of Zoe's moods, tiny feet stepping carefully around broken dreams and shattered promises that littered the figurative floor. Those yellow pants with the elastic waistband were always a size too small, the fabric worn thin at the knees from crawling away from the storm of Zoe's anger, hiding behind that velvet-textured couch with its floral pattern that smelled perpetually of wet dog and stale cigarettes.

In the kitchen, dishes piled like geological formations in a sink spotted with rust stains, yet it remained perfect in it’s cleanliness and appearance. The refrigerator hummed an off-key death rattle, holding nothing meager food given for charity to a woman who deserved none to start with. I would stand on tiptoes, reaching into cabinets with small fingers to find a jar of peanut butter and a spoon, often my favorite treat, the gnawing blandness of it, keeping me warm.

Money slipped through Zoe's fingers like water, evaporating into whatever she wanted, with little care for her own child. Often, I had food kept from me when I was very young. She'd do just enough to get buy, and take the rest from my father in support after their break-up. She made no secret to Helen, much less any other family member, that she did not have to work. That my father would keep her afloat with all of his money.

That cheap pajama top with teddy bears printed on it was washed so many times the fabric had gone transparent in spots, the bears faded ghosts of comfort against skin that never felt quite clean enough. I wore it like armor, clutching stuffed my Curious George plush, and my teddy bear (the only two I ever had), close to my chest when the screaming started, when strange men stumbled through our home with hungry eyes and clumsy hands. She was beautiful, and she was a worthy fuck. And that’s how men saw her. I learned to just hide in my closet when those things happened. I learned to just shut it out.

The house was a fucking labyrinth of dark corners and scratchy shag carpet. You know, the kind that scratches you when you lay bareback on it. The bathroom linoleum was perpetually slick with condensation that bred mold like a cancerous growth in the corners. That plastic toy hammer lay abandoned near electrical outlets missing their covers, because back then there were no covers – childhood innocence playing inches from fucking danger, the perfect metaphor for life with Zoe.

Nights were the worst. When darkness fell, the demons came out to play. They whispered in her ear with her father's voice, hot breath against her neck, telling her she was nothing, would always be nothing. On those nights, I would find her in her room, book shoved into her face, a human question mark, shoulders heaving with sobs that tore from her throat like they were lined with razor blades. I would stand in the doorway, small knuckles white around the door frame, watching her mother shatter into a thousand jagged pieces – pieces that would inevitably draw blood from anyone who dared come too close. It drew my blood more times than it should have. If I made the wrong face, that would mean a beating, or some other thing. A thing I dare not mention or even think about.

That bedroom with its stark white walls felt like a prison cell, illuminated by the harsh glow of a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I would sit cross-legged on the floor, losing myself in what picture books I had, that I could find, picture books that promised happy endings that seemed as fictional as the characters within them. Those little white socks with the elastic tops always slid down skinny ankles, exposing flesh to the biting cold that seeped through the poorly insulated walls, a cold that seemed to reach straight into the marrow of your bones.

Helen's house was an exercise in mutually assured parental avoidance. Zoe would arrive, me in her hands like some fucked-up peace offering, the weight of my small body nothing compared to the burden of responsibility she was desperate to shed. Her fingernails would dig into my shoulder, leaving tiny crescent moons in my flesh – unintentional stigmata that marked me as her son, her mistake, her living, breathing regret. With her friend, Kruger, who would constantly get into trouble with her. They were tied at the hip, two broken girls, like pieces fitting together in all the wrong ways, sharp edges cutting everyone who came too close. The smell of bad decisions trailed them like cheap perfume, their laughter too sharp, too brittle, like glass about to shatter across the pristine tile of Helen's entryway.

I think she was my godmother even. I never liked her. She was always up to something. You could always tell. Not that I understood that very well – just another adult face in the kaleidoscope of chaos, her eyes too bright with whatever they'd taken before arriving. Kruger would ruffle my hair with hands adorned in silver rings that caught the light and momentarily blinded me.

"Take him and do whatever you want with him," Zoe would tell Helen, pushing me forward with hands that smelled of cigarettes, the kind that burns your nostrils and clings to your clothes for days. Each hand-off felt like being tossed between worlds – from Zoe's dark chaos into Helen's bright and joyous normalcy. "I'm leaving, I don't know when I'll be back. Just do for him what you never did for me. Be his mom." she would scowl, her words dripping with acid that ate through the floorboards and poisoned the foundation beneath our feet.

The air would thicken between them, charged with decades of unspoken resentments. I'd stand there, knuckles white around the plastic handle of whatever toy I'd been allowed to bring, feeling the static electricity of their hatred prickle across my skin. My teddy bear pajamas would suddenly feel too thin, too inadequate a shield against the emotional shrapnel flying between them. These hand-offs were like standing in the eye of a hurricane – a brief, terrible stillness before the winds of their mutual destruction picked up again.

The carpet beneath my feet would shift from Zoe's stained, cigarette-burned mess to Helen's vacuum-lined beige expanse – a physical representation of crossing borders between warring nations. Helen's house smelled of potpourri and love, of furniture polish and secrets. The walls were adorned with photos of smiling faces that belied the truth of our fractured existence. I found a haven in her house, a place where I actually felt safe.

"Ok Zoe, Ok." she'd resign herself, voice thin as tissue paper, words whispered through clenched teeth that struggled to hold back all the things she really wanted to say. The vein in her temple would pulse with each heartbeat, her carefully maintained facade cracking slightly at the edges. But nice wasn't in Zoe's vocabulary. Nice had left her years ago, evicted from her heart to make room for more rage, more bitterness, more of the darkness that fed on her like a parasite.

"Don't give me that martyr look," Zoe would spit, her body coiled tight as a snake ready to strike. "We both know you're no saint." The words hung in the air like smoke, acrid and choking. I would press myself against walls, trying to become invisible, to melt into the wallpaper patterns and disappear from this battlefield where I was both prize and casualty.

Sometimes Helen would cry after Zoe left, quiet tears that carved paths through her foundation. She'd wipe them away quickly, plastering on a smile that never reached her eyes. She found joy in me, I think. She found in me something she had lost. She could focus on me now, and do things for me that Zoe would never do. The broken pieces of her heart seemed to mend, if only temporarily, when she watched me discover something new – when my eyes lit up with wonder instead of fear.

"Let's get you something to eat," she'd say, leading me to a kitchen that smelled of potpourri, herbs, and warm food. It smelled wholesome and good – like someone actually gave a damn whether food rotted or was eaten. The air thick with the scent of rosemary and sage or homemade bread, smells so foreign to me they might as well have been from another fucking planet. Her refrigerator was the opposite of Zoe's – organized, stocked, a shrine to the normal life she desperately pretended to have while her own marriage disintegrated behind closed doors.

She knew what Zoe was doing to me – the neglect, the emotional warfare, the physical damage, it was all there. Helen would run her fingertips over these marks, her touch feather-light, tears welling in her eyes. "Oh, my sweet boy," she'd whisper, voice cracking like thin ice underfoot. She'd apply love and care to me where possible, her hands trembling with a rage she never allowed herself to fully express.

I'd sit at her table, legs swinging, unable to reach the floor, watching her as she cut sandwiches into triangles – something Zoe would never bother with. The bread always fresh, not the stale ends held together with the last scraping of peanut butter from an almost-empty jar. Helen would watch me eat with hungry eyes, as though nourishing me might somehow feed the starving parts of herself. "Eat, sweetheart. You need your strength," she'd say, and in those words was a lifetime of knowing exactly what I was up against. This is what Motherhood was to me. The Mother I try to be now is embodied by this very memory.

Some weekends, Helen would whisk me away to the movie theater – a velvet-dark cathedral where reality melted away for two glorious, breathtaking hours. She'd hold my hand through the thrilling parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark, her laughter like silver bells when I'd peek through trembling fingers as faces transformed into swirling light. "It's just pretend," she'd whisper, her touch a talisman against fear, squeezing my fingers with a gentle reassurance that flooded me with courage. Unlike the shadows at home, these cinematic monsters surrendered to light and music when the story ended.

When Star Wars blazed onto the screen at our local theater, she took me three fucking times. Each visit was a gift wrapped in wonder. She'd buy me popcorn drenched in golden butter that tasted like pure joy – rich and decadent on my tongue as it dissolved into salty bliss. Helen watched my face instead of the screen, her eyes reflecting the starlight from distant galaxies as Darth Vader's breath rolled through the theater like thunder before rain. The lightsabers painted her face in magical hues – blues and reds dancing across her features as her smile grew, feeding on my delight like it was the most precious substance in the universe.

In those darkened rows, with strangers laughing and gasping around us, we became explorers of impossible worlds. The screen wasn't just showing movies – it was a goddamn portal to somewhere beautiful, somewhere we both desperately needed to be. And Helen, beautiful Helen with her weathered hands and knowing eyes, gave me that escape like it was oxygen when I was drowning.

Helen's house was full of these small mercies, these tiny attempts at normalcy that somehow made the abnormal even more fucking jarring. Clean sheets that smelled of fabric softener. Meals at regular times. Bedtime stories read in a voice that never cracked, which was most nights by the time I was old enough to recognize the sweet-sour smell of her perfume – Chanel No. 5, I would learn years later, a scent that would forever after make my chest ache with a complicated nostalgia.

She'd brush my hair with gentle, mesmerizing strokes, nothing like the hell of Zoe's impatient yanking that set my scalp on fire. "Such beautiful hair," she'd murmur, her voice a warm honey that poured over my wounded spirit. I'd close my eyes, surrendering to the sweet fantasy that she was my real mother, that I belonged to her magical realm instead of the chaotic storm that had birthed me. Helen knew that and always called me her child.

When Zoe would finally blast through the door—eyes electric and feral, movements sharp and unpredictable like some goddamn haunted wind-up toy—Helen would transform before my eyes. Her spine would lengthen, her small frame expanding with unspoken power until she somehow filled the entire fucking doorway with her quiet strength. "He's sleeping," she'd lie sometimes, her voice steady as stone while I curled behind her armchair, heart thundering in my chest, drinking in every syllable. "Come back tomorrow when you're... better." That word—better—hung in the air like enchanted dust, glittering with all the truths Helen was too gracious to voice aloud.

I'd sprawl on her carpet with my picture and coloring books, just like in those sun-faded photographs, diving headfirst into glorious worlds where mothers were made of something unbreakable, where children weren't just disposable pieces in grown-up games of emotional Russian roulette. Helen would perch in her orange corduroy throne, that high-backed armchair catching firelight like amber, watching me with eyes that sparkled with a love so pure it made my chest ache with its beauty—eyes haunted by the fear she might fail me as she believed she'd failed her own daughter, yet still brimming with a kindness that could heal broken souls.

Once, I heard her on the phone, voice low and dangerous – a tone I'd never heard from gentle Helen before. "If you keep hurting him, Zoe, I swear to God I'm going to stop it." A pause, then: "I don't care what you do to yourself anymore, but that child deserves better." She hung up and found me standing in the hallway.

Between us stretched the ghost of Zoe, the black hole around which both our lives were forced to orbit, her gravitational pull distorting everything it touched. But in Helen's house, in those precious stolen moments of almost-normal, I learned that love could exist without conditions, that care didn't always come with claws attached. Helen loved me like I was her own, a love so pure it glowed like a beacon in the darkness Zoe had created. A love that would eventually save what little remained of my battered soul.

Living between these two women shaped me in ways I'm still fucking untangling decades later—Zoe with her hurricane heart leaving destruction in her wake, and Helen with her quiet strength offering sanctuary when the storms grew too fierce. My childhood was this brutal dance between neglect and salvation, between a mother who saw me as an extension of her brokenness and a grandmother who recognized the light still fighting to shine through my cracks. The lessons I learned weren't found in picture books but etched into my bones: how to touch a world that doesn't want you touched, how to survive in the spaces between someone else's chaos, how to find warmth in the smallest mercies—a buttered popcorn, a gentle brush of hair, a protective lie whispered at a doorway. I emerged from those years like some strange creature forged in opposing fires—damaged yet resilient, wary yet hopeful, carrying both women in my blood and in my memory, forever caught between the person I was shaped to be and the person I desperately fought to become.