Dulce María Loynaz, from These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women; "Time"

Higgs’ Journal Entry #24 || Year - UNKNOWN

My first memory is of looking up at the ceiling of our shelter, as a baby bawling my eyes out. All of a sudden, the hand of god comes into view, blotting out the steel sky. Daddy. Lifts me up, not gentle, but not hard. Shouts some stuff, but it’s all gibberish I can’t make heads or tails of.

He ain’t my real daddy, though. That one died before I was born, and Mama soon after. Of disease or something, I dunno. Her brother took me in, whisked me away from that shelter reeking of piss and death and brought me here. Daddy number two.

He never really took to it. He was an ugly, violent man, full of anger with nowhere to go. Tried to love me, in his own way, but I don’t know if he ever had it in him. Daddy told me our shelter was our world, and I believed him. I grew up thinking no one but us two existed. Then, when I got a little older, I started asking questions. Simple questions about where the food came from, that kind of thing. Got smacked upside the head for my troubles, but try as he might, he couldn’t beat the curiosity out of me.

One day I peeked at his monitor. It was the first glimpse I’d ever caught of the outside world. I pestered Daddy about it, and you bet I caught holy hell for it. But I wore him down, and eventually he came clean and admitted there was a whole world out there, soaked to the bone by timefall and overrun by demons that’d eat me up.

It occurred to me later that his fearmongering probably got my mama killed. Filling her head with his hysterics about the dead walking the earth, and the only safe haven being six feet under…

Higgs’ Journal Entry #25 || Year - UNKNOWN

My mama entrusted me to her brother, so he had no choice but to raise me best he could. Say what you will about the man, but he had himself a sense of obligation. He might even have harbored a measure of affection for me, but whatever was in his heart he expressed with his hands. His fists.

Any hopes and dreams he might have had for me— for us— fell by the wayside pretty quick. We slipped into a daily routine of warnings to stay the fuck inside, bookended by beatings to drive the point home. I think sometimes he sincerely believed that was the only way to protect me, but I wasn’t about to go on living like that. Can’t cage a young boy’s spirit. If I’d stayed, I’d’ve died, body and soul. I had to get out. Started hoarding supplies in secret, but he caught on.

That was the beginning of the worst beating yet. He was grabbing anything and everything within reach that could be used as a weapon. Tearing our shelter apart, smashing furniture, all the while wailing like a wounded animal, tears streaming down his face.

He pinned me down, tears and spit flying in my face as he blubbered on about me not understanding his pain. His fucking pain. His hands round my neck, darkness creeping in from the corners. His fucking pain. His fucking pain.

The kitchen knife in my hands. In his neck. His hands, his fucking hands, they grow weak, and he just… deflates. Like a balloon, all over me. I roll him off, and I look into his glassy eyes, filled with his fucking pain and our steel sky.