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.

A Single Finger

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.

And For the Father, Nothing

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 Hollow Empty Years

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.

My Mother of Mercy

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.

My House of Pain: Who Was Helen......

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.