On and On and On
On the fifth anniversary of his father’s heroic death in a far-off jungle, a nine-year-old boy pleads and screams as he’s dragged into a tool shed by his drunken stepfather.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary, the boy, reeking of cheap whisky and cigarettes, staggers into his daughter’s bedroom while the young girl cowers against the wall.
On the fifty-eighth anniversary, that girl collapses into her lightless closet, and as her fury-laced glares and impaling shouts become anguished sobs, her teenage daughter sits alone in the bathroom and once again glides the thin, comforting edge of a razor blade across her thigh.