Leonard D. Hilley II's Blog, page 7

Apple Books? iBooks for FREE?

Seldom do I offer my novels for free. I’m running a mid-summer Promo. So help yourself to some freebies and tell your reading friends. Please subscribe and get a FREE copy of Forrest Wollinsky: Vampire Hunter. I don’t spam with newsletters and have only sent one newsletter to date.

My author page link on Apple Books: Leonard D. Hilley II Apple Books

Below are the following novels of mine on FREE promotion for the next few days at Apple Books:

Sci-fi Suspense Thrillers:

Predators of Darkness: Aftermath

Death’s Valley

Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Fantasy:

Forrest Wollinsky Book One

Forrest Wollinsky Book Two

Forrest Wollinsky Book Three

Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance:

Succubus: Shadows of the Beast

A Touch of the Familiar

Epic Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery:

Lady Squire (Aetheaon Chronicles: Book Two)

Shadowfae (Aetheaon Chronicles: Book Four)

 

 

Someday Never Comes

A dark chapter excerpt from my memoirs when I was about thirteen years old:

Alcoholism had been a key factor in my parent’s divorce, and our mother’s addiction didn’t end after he moved out and fled Alabama for marrying a fourteen year old girl. Her drinking got worse. She despised our father for a lot of things, but what had crushed her ego the most was him marrying a teenager younger than my two older brothers and only a year older than myself. Our father was thirty-eight years old.

Most nights, my mother drank until she could barely walk to her bed without falling down.

I awakened one night and heard her mumbling in the living room. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, so I got up to check on her.

She sat in her rocking chair that creaked in harmony with the hardwood floor. Her words were slurred. When I asked what was wrong, she blamed God for all her misery. Her whole life had been nothing but failure. It was His fault. God hated her and she despised Him. Gina and I were in church every Sunday morning, evening, and on Wednesdays at the time. Church was our escape from our home-life.

I tried to reassure my mother that He was not her enemy. She spouted off more vile bitterness. I pointed out Job in the Bible and she responded with, “What kind of god would treat his own servant like that?”

I shook my head and went back to bed.

Since it was summer, I stayed up later most nights to collect moths at the safety light at the edge of our property. She kept drinking. We only had food because we were on food stamps. Our father didn’t pay child support and the system back in the late 70s had a difficult time finding a deadbeat father to make him pay what the court had decreed. Everything then was paperwork. No computers were used to track people. I made money picking up aluminum cans and mowing yards. The money I made, she took, seldom allowing me to keep any. So, involuntarily, I was the reason she could buy liquor, beer, and cigarettes.

We heard the lie constantly from our mother. “When I get that insurance settlement, I’ll pay you back what I owe you.”

Over the years, she built up a huge tab with Gina and I. A tab she never paid back.

One night while I had been collecting moths and beetles at the light, she was drinking herself deeper into her brooding despair. I hated to listen to her slurred speech when she got like that. No one could talk to her when she was drunk, and I kept my distance from her as best I could.

Her bitterness toward our father spilled over to me that night, not because I resembled him in appearance, but because I had his name. I came inside and sat on our old couch. She ranted about various things and then her rants became personal for reasons I’ll never understand. I was an innocent bystander caught in her convenient bullseye.

She staggered into the kitchen to get something and when she came back into the living room, she wobbled in front of me. I was trying to watch whatever was on the television.

“You’re just like your father,” she slurred, pointing her finger in my face. Her accusation I took as a direct insult because I wasn’t anything like him and vowed never to be.

Our father drank a lot before their divorce, but I’d never seen him drunk. Never. Perhaps he was better at hiding it or he had a higher tolerance. Regardless, I never saw him drunk.

Her comparison of me to him pissed me off. I looked her dead in the eye. “Well, seeing you in your current condition, I take that as a compliment.”

My mother drew back her hand and tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist with her hand just inches from my cheek. She shook with anger. Her face contorted and her eyes narrowed. I imagine her anger escalated because she knew how I felt about my father and that being like him instead of being like she currently was, my words stung worse and cut deep.

I released her wrist, still looking her in the eyes. She brought her hand back again, and I could’ve easily blocked it just the same as before, but I let her strike me. After she hit me, I got up and went outside, not saying a word.

That moment forever changed my view of her. I lost any affection for her. I couldn’t even pity her. She’d continue spouting her dissatisfaction and disdain for the whole world and God, even after I was outside.

I lay on the old wagon bed that had belonged to my great grandfather and stared at the stars. I probably stayed there for a half hour, thinking and wondering about why I’d been placed into this particular dysfunctional household. My father’s absence was slowly callousing and bothered me less. I thought about him less and less. My mother had struck me for absolutely no justifiable reason. I didn’t hate her. I despised her actions. I despised what she’d become. She had no reason to blame me for her drunkenness or the fact that we were in our current financial state.

Physically, she was able to work, but she refused to, because she hoped to get an insurance settlement for a car accident from nearly six years earlier. Mentally, however, she was a shambled mess. Her striking me had crossed a line I never expected. Blaming me for what our father had done and was doing … was unreasonable. While some might say it was due to her alcoholism, I argue that drunk people more readily allow their true natures to emerge. They cannot hold back what they really are. Their real inhibitions get displayed and they act on what they’ve held secret.

From that day, I lost my compassion for her as a mother. Even now, I know that night was when she no longer was my mother. She severed the tie.

I got up from the wagon bed and went to the back door. She had locked me out of the house. To teach me a lesson, I suppose? What lesson, I wasn’t sure about. I had done nothing to draw her anger toward me until she verbally insulted me and I responded in kind.

I walked around the house to my bedroom window, which I purposely kept unlocked. I pushed the window up and crawled through. My bedroom door was partway ajar. I peered through. From where I stood, I could see into her bedroom. The light was out, but the glow of her cigarette indicated that she was still awake.

The outside security light spilled into my room, allowing me to see without having to turn on my bedroom light. I stretched out on my bed, reached down to my cassette player on the floor, and lowered the volume. The cassette was one my father had dubbed and left me with a box of a hundred more mixes he’d made. This cassette contained only Creedence Clearwater Revival songs. I clicked the play button and “Someday Never Comes” played. For the first time, the words made so much sense to me. When the song ended, I pressed rewind and played it again. And again and again. (Thank goodness for CDs today, right?)

After the song played through the fifth time or so, she staggered into my room, rubbed the side of my face, kissed my head and said that she was sorry. I said nothing in return. I had no words for her. I had no feelings toward her at all. I was hurt and not really angry. Her words and her apology meant nothing. I was cold and empty inside.

As the song indicates, some things in life we’ll never understand. Some questions are never answered. We can spend a lifetime trying to figure out why people behave the way they do or why they mistreat us, but the answers aren’t readily available. We might never know. It’s best to live our lives without fretting over reasons we might never discover. After all, someday never comes.

If You Could Go Back in Time …

What would you change?

About ten years after I graduated from Plainview, I ran into an old friend of mine from school. We shared briefly some of the ordeals we’d both suffered during the time we’d been out in the real world. Each of us suffered some long rough patches.

After he told me about his life experiences, I made the comment that most people say, “If only we could go back in time and change things.”

With a serious expression, he said, “I’ve thought about that from time to time, but if I could go back, I wouldn’t change one thing.”

“Seriously? Why not?” I asked.

“Because I learned from those bad experiences.”

After we parted ways, I thought about that. For a long time, up until that point, I wished I could have gone back in time and fixed some things. There were things I wished I’d said to certain people who meant the world to me but I had been too afraid to tell them at the time. I made bad decisions that affected my mind and wished I could have gone a different route with my life. Lost loves. Job opportunities. A horrible first marriage I’d have skipped. Dropping out of college after my first year … I’d have undone that. Many other things would have been done differently, too.

If you’re reading this and are thinking that you’d go back and change things like I once had hoped I could, maybe you’ll understand why I now agree with him. All the heartache and misery I’ve experienced over the years, I wouldn’t change, if given such an opportunity.

I realized if I continued living with such a mindset, I would live a life of regret by constantly looking into the past. If you’re living in the past, you cannot enjoy the present and you will not progress into the future. You’re stuck in one place. I decided to accept the past and realized that I am who I am today because of the hardships I have overcome. Altering those bad situations and mistakes, while it seems a beneficial way to shield ourselves from the hurt we’ve experienced, inevitably disrupts future events and the pathways we were destined to take. Backtracking to change events unravels far more than you realize. For if you erased one path, everything else associated to that path by our decisions (possibly unknown to us) would be altered and erased as well. Quite possibly, situations could end up far worse for us or others.

The term, “Butterfly Effect”, comes from Ray Bradbury’s short story, A Sound of Thunder, wherein a team of hunters time travel into the past to hunt dinosaurs. But they can only kill the dinosaurs the leader shows them, as these are sick and destined to die soon. Their deaths won’t alter the timeline. The hunters are given a warning to stay on the silver pathway lest they destroy something else. One of the hunters accidentally steps off and crushes a butterfly. The first butterfly. This simple mistake offsets everything in the future, causing a catastrophe in itself. Changing the past, ever so slightly, brings disaster.

In an interview, Stephen King once talked about how a person could have turned a different direction and missed their soulmate. Is it destiny? Or chance? An interesting concept to think about.

Reviewing the past in our mind’s eye, we only see how our decisions affected us. Other factors in other people’s lives also occurred at the time due to us, and we might never know about the benefits they received from our failures. Opportunities come in various ways.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I understand how changing the most painful three years of my life so I didn’t suffer the anguish would unset where I am today. I wouldn’t have my wonderful wife of twenty-six years, my two children, and my two grandchildren. I’d endure those painful years all over, as long as I never lost them. They are the mountain on the other side of a deep, dark valley of turmoil. They are the blessings I had sought for so long. Treasures unmatched by any amount of wealth. Treasures worth trudging through the heartaches all over again.

In nature, forest fires are inevitable. They are devastating when we see them, but a necessary part of nature. Certain conifers cannot reseed without fire. The seeds are trapped inside the cones. Extreme heat is required to melt the wax so the cones expand and release the seeds. Without this pressure, no future pines of these species would emerge. After a forest fire, flowers and other rare plants are finally able to return for a while to reseed as well.

We see the horror of the forest fires. We see the charred remnants afterwards. But, often, no one ever notices the beauty that soon emerges after the fires are gone. The beautiful flowers. New life. Renewed life. This cycle of nature often goes unseen.

Not everything in life is an easy path. Rocky roads and dark valleys test us. They refine us. We fall. We fail. When you reach that time of loss and hit the ground, you have a choice. Stay there and die; or, pick yourself up and dust yourself off. Fight your way onward.

I had low points during those dark times where I almost threw in the towel. I almost quit. I didn’t want to continue living. Dark days, folks. Some very dark days. And it didn’t help having a person pushing me in that direction by making my life unbearable. By some miracle, I shook it off and got back up.

I realize this is my take on the events that have shaped my life. Others have had it far worse than I have. And some have had wonderful lives without much hardship at all.

As I’m currently writing my memoirs, I never realized the depth of some hardships I have endured. I had buried them and bringing them to the surface hasn’t been easy. What I’ve learned from writing about my life is that these events shaped me into who I am. I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without the episodes I experienced. Hell, I wouldn’t be a writer at all.

Until next time …. Keep on keeping on!

Stephen King Moments

Every now and then, I have eerie encounters that I consider “Stephen King Moments”, as though I might have stepped through some portal into the landscape of one of his novels.

About a year after my wife and I married, we drove from Fort Payne to Rising Fawn to get gasoline for our Cordoba. Our infant son was in his carseat with my twin sisters seated in the back. The car’s tank held twenty gallons but the gas gauge wasn’t always accurate. That day was a day when the gauge was way off.

Less than a mile from the exit, the engine sputtered. I knew the tank was empty and coasted as far as possible in the emergency lane. Luckily, the fall day held a moderate temperature, so I got out of the car and started jogging since the distance wasn’t far.

Crossing the hill, I looked back a final time before the car would slip from my view. I hated leaving them, but we couldn’t lug our son along the Interstate. Several cars passed, and a few minutes later, a semi slowed and sounded his horn. He pulled to the edge of the road. I was thankful to get a ride so I hurried my pace. Then, I nearly stopped walking. A moment of trepidation washed over me as the passenger side door of the truck was flung open. I don’t know why that unnerved me, but all I could think about were those terrorizing movies where the hitchhiker gets into the wrong vehicle. The open door seemed intimidating. I suppose that’s because a writer’s mind tries to view situations from every angle. I just happened to picture the worst case scenario first.

A little apprehensive, I walked to the passenger side of the door and looked up. The man was probably in his twenties, smiled, and asked if I had run out of gas or had engine trouble. I told him the tank was empty, climbed into the truck, and closed the door.

He laughed and said, “At least you’re not far from the station.”

The trucker took the exit and needed fuel at the station, too. I thanked him and went inside to get a gas can and buy a gallon of gas. With the metal can filled with gasoline in tow, I hurried back to the Interstate.

I barely walked a quarter mile before a guy in a BMW pulled to the side of the road and asked if the car on other side was mine. When I told him it was, he told me to get in. He drove his fancy vehicle across the median to where our car was parked.

“I hate that you have to turn back around,” I said.

He smiled. “I was headed north when I saw you walking and turned around to give you a lift to your car. I’m headed in the right direction.”

I thanked him and he was gone.

Kindness from strangers seems rarer these days. I’ve had other times where I’ve walked miles wearing dress clothes and no one bothered stopping. That was a blessed day, making the ordeal take far less time than it would’ve, had no one stopped. And thankfully, neither driver had escaped from one of Stephen King’s novels.

Cheers!

 

Redneck Go-cart

I was probably around ten years old when our father traded for an old pale-green, riding mower. Since our yard was almost two acres, and we always used push mowers, having a riding mower seemed like a great benefit for him. However, the belt for the blades kept snapping. After replacing the belt twice, he decided not to waste more money buying more belts. Instead, he said, “You have yourself a go-cart now.”

He took off the blades and blade housing and let me drive it around the yard. The only problematic issue with the mower was the clutch. When you pushed the clutch in to set the mower in gear, you had to release it slowly. If you didn’t, the front end shot upright like a horse trying to throw you or popping a wheelie on a bicycle. I must admit it was greatly amusing the first few times our father experienced this revelation, which actually was too dangerous to keep the blades on. Even though the blade-less mower wasn’t extremely fast, riding it was fun.

Several times, I got strange looks from passersby that had, at first, thought I was mowing grass and shockingly discovered the mower had no blades. Their incredulous stares were worth a thousand words. A mower go-cart probably sparked a bit of confusion for them.

Our father did tuneups for cars and often traded cars with other people in the area. Some of these folks got a kick out of seeing a mower being used as a go-cart. Each day after school, I’d ride it around the yard for a while, but one day I came home and the mower was gone. According to my mother, someone offered to buy it from our father and he sold it. Just like that, my ride was gone. That was a pattern of his. The fact that he’d given something to you didn’t matter. If someone came along, wanting to buy it, he’d sell without a second thought.

Before I was old enough to drive, he gave me three different cars. One was a Christmas present because we didn’t have money for Christmas, and each of these, he sold. I guess he didn’t remember or care that one was my present. He did the same to my oldest brother by selling a car he was promised. Our father’s word, at least to family members, was worthless.

But, for a few weeks, I had some fun with what could only be described as a Redneck Go-cart.

iBooks over Kindle?

For those of you who prefer iBooks over Kindle, you can find most of my novels on APPLE at the following link: Leonard D. Hilley’s Apple Books. Prices are the same as on Kindle. Cheers!

Dee’s Mystery Solvers: Buried Treasure

Dee’s Mystery Solvers: Buried Treasure is currently available in paperback at your favorite bookstore and online retailers like Amazon, Books-A-Million, and Barnes & Noble. $9.99 Use the code “Sunshine” at Barnes & Noble to get a 10% discount!

Mystery/Suspense/YA:

“Almost every teenager has dreamed of finding buried treasure at the beach. While accompanying Dee and Marty’s mother and Lynn’s mother on a business trip in Morgan’s Cove, the Mystery Solvers find a treasure map inside an old seaweed-covered bottle near the beach. Thinking they’ve discovered a find of a lifetime, they set out to various shops to get more information about the history of the cove and what Pirates of Olde might have buried their treasures there in the past.

Their sleuthing questions, however, capture the attention of some modern day thieves who keep watchful eyes on the Mystery Solvers’ activities. Soon the Mystery Solvers find themselves in harm’s way and that some secrets are often best left buried. They are forced to consider the price of their lives over the potential worth of unknown treasure.”

Mowing Grass

When I was a little kid, I always wanted to mow the grass. My oldest brother mowed our lawn a lot, and our father did, too. I wasn’t allowed because it was too dangerous. Perhaps telling me I couldn’t mow the grass was a bit of reverse psychology because not being able to mow only made me want to cut the grass even more.

For the longest time, I begged to mow the grass. I understood the blades were dangerous so pushing a lawnmower was something a responsible older person got to do. Getting permission to mow would mean I was no longer a little kid. I was about seven years old when, one day, our father finally motioned me to take the handlebar of the mower.

Being scrawny, I soon discovered how hard the task was. In the 1970s, the push mower bodies were extremely heavy and the handlebar on this particular mower was almost my height. I’d shove my body against the handle and push hard, almost lifting the back of the mower off the ground until the wheels started rolling. He never let me cut the grass without him being nearby, and only cut on level areas at that time.

Our father and our first cousin, Harold, got a lot of amusement from watching me fight the lawnmower, but I didn’t complain. I worked hard and at the time, I enjoyed it. Now, in my 50s? Not so much. Mowing probably wouldn’t be so bad if the lawn on each side of our house didn’t slant at forty-five degree angles. Going down the hillside is easy. Sometimes, a little too easy. God only knows how bad it could be if the mowers today weighed as much as the ones back then. It’s doubtful I could slow my descent.

After our parents divorced, I cut lawns to earn extra money as a teenager, and in my early twenties, I entertained the idea of landscaping and mowing for a while. I have since come to my senses. Regardless, there’s great satisfaction in having a well-maintained lawn. I’ve always preferred push mowers and never owned a riding mower. But now, I need to accept reality and consider the time factor. With a rider, I could cut our lawn in one fourth the time it takes now. Time’s a big factor when you’re over fifty.   =)

Until next time ….

Bullies

When I entered seventh grade, the final stage was set for my parents’ divorce. I had known it was coming. I listened to their heated arguments every night when our father came home from work (a much longer, detailed explanation at another time).

Seventh grade was not a good year for me. With the turmoil going on at home, and the adjustment of our class being in the same halls with the other students in grades 8-12, I struggled with uncertainty of how to find my place and how to interact with those older than me.

My total lack of self-esteem showed on my face and how I carried myself. Basically, this put a target on my back, making me easy prey for the older kids who liked to bully smaller ones.

When I tell college students in the Strategies for Success courses that I was bullied as a teenager, it’s often followed by a snicker. One student told me that he could never picture me being bullied in school, but he saw me after twenty years of lifting weights in the gym. In seventh grade, I might have weighed 140 pounds. As a college professor, I was 250 pounds and quite intimidating to some students when they first sit in my classes. But then, I was a skinny, frightened kid with no confidence. Perhaps this is why I began weight lifting and gaining muscle.

I wanted to play football and had been on the sixth grade team. Since the fall team football tryouts were taking place, I stayed after school. I vividly remember wearing a shirt that I loved when I picked it out at the store. On the front was this wicked lizard-man standing at the edge of the swamp with MONSTER written above it. It reminded me of the television show, ‘The Night Stalker’, and I had looked forward to wearing it to school. Unfortunately, it would be the only time I ever wore the shirt.

While standing around with other students waiting on the coach, three students in the tenth grade had stayed after school to watch the tryouts. They weren’t football players. They noticed my T-shirt and started calling me monster. At the time, I had severe acne, which I was self-conscious about. Had they only called me that once or twice, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me. But it became a way for them to torment me every time they saw me in the halls.

I never wore the shirt again. In fact, I threw the shirt in the garbage when I got home without my mother noticing. But they continued as the bully trio and sang lines from the song, ‘Monster Mash’, each time they saw me. It might seem humorous now, but then, it made me not want to go to school. It furthered my depressive state because of our uncertain home life.

I told my father about it, that there were three of them, and he offered some advice. But a few weeks later, he moved out. I never felt more vulnerable and alone than I did then in my family. I hated the thought of seeing these three guys. I loved school, but I hated having to change classes. I dreaded it. They identified my fear and lack of confidence and they hammered me with their constant teasing. It came to a point that when I tried to veer out of their line of sight in the crowded hallway, the three of them would block me from getting away. They’d stand over me, trying to intimidate me, almost daring me to fight my way past them. It became too much for me to handle and none of my friends stood with me. It wasn’t their place to, but I knew three against one wasn’t something in my favor. Those odds aren’t good for anyone. I was thin and weak and afraid of fighting. More daunting, I was afraid of being suspended or being expelled for fighting.

After several more weeks, I got the courage to go talk to Mr. Everett, our principal. He was a good sized guy and I thought if I told him, he might call the three to the office and make them stop. I stepped into his office and he sat down at his desk. The one thing about Mr. Everett that intimidated me was that every time you asked him a direct question, his response was, “What!” The loud tone he used usually made me forget what I needed to say.

So when he asked what was going on, I told him the three students’ names (I still remember them) and that they kept bullying and taunting me. He asked, “What would your father tell you to do.”

I said, “He’d tell me to tear into them.” And basically, that had been his advice.

Mr. Everett stared at me for a few seconds and then he said, “Well, I hate to say it, but sometimes that’s what you have to do.”

I left his office dumbfounded. He wasn’t going to confront them, or tell them to leave me alone, and he seemed to have given me permission to stand up for myself. You’d never see this in schools today.

I left his office and entered the hallway, terrified. I didn’t know how to fight. I didn’t want to fight. There was no way I could fight all three at once, either. They always seemed to be together.

Knowing I probably wasn’t going to get into trouble if I fought to defend myself, I no longer worried about the consequences of being sent to the office. A day or so later, as I walked the hallway, I noticed one of the three by himself and he entered the restroom. I waited about a minute and then entered as he was on his way back out. He gave me an odd grin, trying to intimidate me, but since he was alone, I glared at him and made fists. Without his buddies, he suddenly looked frightened. He nodded and hurried past me.

My heart hammered in my chest, but it had felt great to stand up to him. I’m not sure why, but my confidence increased. I did the same to one of the other two in the hallway. When he was by himself, he wasn’t bold or threatening, either. In fact, he seemed as fearful to fight as what I had when all three of them cornered me. But, the key difference between him and I was that I was pissed and fed up with how they were treating me. Both of them looked at me differently and maybe they realized they had carried it too far. However, neither of them was the leader.

The final confrontation came between me and the leader, who, by the way, was the shortest of the three. I’ve never understood that. In most of these little bully groups the shortest kid is always the leader. It’s laughable in a way, but it’s the truth. This guy was shorter than I.

So it happened during break. I was on my way out of the hall to go to the outside recess area where the school buses and old gym used to be. Coming down the hallway directly in my path was the leader. He came right at me and I never tried to step out of his way. I was done with it. We walked straight up to one another and he shoved me. When he did, I shoved him back, hard. My action confused him. He didn’t expect it. He shoved me again and I shoved back. I was no longer afraid of him, and he knew it.

He stepped into a classroom where a bunch of his friends were standing around. He said, “Come in here, if you want to fight.”

“I’m not going in there where your friends are. If you want to fight, let’s take it outside,” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d said those words, but I did. I didn’t have any fear.

He kept waving me to come into the room to fight.

A kid from my class noticed and asked, “Are you really going to fight him?”

I replied, “If he comes outside of school, I’ll fight him.” I told the bully that one more time, but he refused to step outside of the room.

Not one of those three ever bothered me again. Never said a word to me. I never had to throw a punch. I simply stood my ground.

About eight years after my graduation and three years after weight training in the gym, I went into a general store near my mother’s house. Stepping up to the counter beside me was the leader of those three bullies. I glanced over and down at him. He was still the same height as he was in high school and skinny. I was about six inches taller, broader, and much stronger. He glanced at me and remembered who I was, but he never said anything. He didn’t even make eye contact. I grinned, paid for my stuff, and walked out.

Other things about me had changed since my confrontation with those three. I had gained self-esteem and was bolder. I held my chin up and carried myself with confidence, but not in arrogance. Most people think others judge you by what you wear or what you drive. Actually, people judge you by your actions, how you carry yourself, and by your confidence. The whole reason these three picked on me was because my low self-esteem was evident. They knew I was an easy target, at least for a while. And I learned from the experience that most bullies stop bullying when someone stands up to them.

Until next time ….

Mental Scars

Long after physical abuse has ended during childhood, the mental scars remain. Physical bruises heal and fade away. The memories of those incidents, however, are often carried throughout life. When someone much stronger than you constantly presses you down, what can you do when you’re a child? For me, I turned inward, became an introvert, and lacked self-esteem for almost twenty-five years of my life.

My siblings and I grew up during a time when kids were to be seen and not heard. At school, I was the quiet kid in class, mostly because of the consequences I suffered if I made too much noise at home. And, if we got into trouble at school, we would be punished more severely when we got home.

My sister and I spent hours playing but always in our rooms where we were out of sight and weren’t allowed to make a lot of noise. We never had noisy toys like cap guns or anything that made irritating sounds. Someone gave me a cap gun for Christmas one year, but it vanished overnight.

In school, I made great grades. My mother would offer praise for them, but my father said that I should have A+ on everything. Some teachers never put the + after the A, even if the final grades could be considered such. Yet, he repeated this every time, which was subtle bullying as an initiative for higher marks.

Our oldest brother lived with us and attended Plainview when he was in the ninth grade. Because of our father’s reactions to average or unsatisfactory grades, my brother altered some of his grades on the report card with a little crafty work with a pen. Once, he told the school office he’d lost his report card and needed to buy one to give his teacher. I’m not sure why the office used to allow this, but they sold him one. He filled in all the classes and his grades, handed them to our father, but our father didn’t offer any real praise. Chris hid the fake report card and took the other one back to school.

Chris lived in the one-room shed in the backyard that one of our uncles helped renovate into a decent place to live. Our father found the fake report card ripped up in the shed, and when Chris came home from school, he was confronted about it. Then, our father took his belt and proceeded to whip him, not with the belt, but with the buckle. He made me and Gina watch. At the time, we didn’t know about the other report card. We simply thought he’d made some bad grades. The incident stuck with me, not as incentive to do better in school, but a fear of what happened if I did poorly on a test or brought home bad grades on a report card.

The abuse wasn’t necessary. At no time did our father ever consider that he played a part in why Chris bought the report card, filled in the grades, and handed it to him. The fear of turning in a report card with bad grades would have been almost as bad. There was no winning situation in either outcome. Chris moved back home with his mother, and I don’t blame him. If I’d have had an out for a safer place, I’d have taken it.

These type of abusive situations caused me to stay in my room and seek ways to entertain myself. My imagination took over. I began making my own comic strips. They were short, not well drawn, but I loved drawing each panel and putting together a short story. I’d show them to my parents. They seemed to like them, so I made more.

When the first Star Wars movie hit the big screen, our father rented the VIP room at Fort Payne’s Cinema. The movie did magical things for my imagination. The space ships, the laser weapons, the light sabers, and the various alien races were spectacular to a ten year old kid. The effects of this movie made me wish such places existed. But they could and did, in my mind. The next week, I began writing my first novel. I wasn’t quite eleven years old.

I remembered John Boy on The Waltons and how he wanted to become a writer. Because it was considered a feminine occupation in the show (I’m guessing), he wrote in journals and kept them hidden from his family, partly because he felt ashamed. I did something similar with loose leaf notebook paper. I wrote the beginning of my book on notebook paper and slid them under a large sketchpad on the top of my dresser. Creating this world somewhere deep in space felt like an accomplishment, and I also like having the secret of being the only one that knew about my writing project. I’d tuck it away at night and return to the story the next afternoon after school, eager to continue.

Our parents never knocked on our doors. They barged in. On one particular evening, my father pushed open my bedroom door. I quickly slid the papers of my story under my art sketchpad and turned toward the door with surprise.

“What do you have there?” he asked. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He frowned and gave that odd sly grin that indicated he’d come back when I was out of the room and look anyway.

“Ah, okay.” He shut the door.

I returned to writing, knowing that I couldn’t keep this a secret anymore, as he would snoop to find out what I was doing. So after I completed a few more pages, I went into the living room and told my parents that I was writing a book. They wanted to read what I had written so far, so I handed it to them.

Censorship was introduced to me at an early age. They read the story and then asked me to come back into the living room.

“There’s too much violence,” my mother said.

“Well, it’s an alien invasion with spaceships firing at the civilians on the planet,” I thought, too afraid to voice any opposition. “Some of them are going to die and not pleasantly.”

“You shouldn’t write like that,” my father said.

Confused, I thought, “Things far worse than this happened in Star Wars, and everyone loved it.” The truth was, we watched far more violent shows on television than the mild scene I had written. We’d also watched far WORSE movies at the drive-in and the cinema and some of those had traumatized me for years.

I kept writing but I started a new story.

When I entered the fourth grade, our parents took their GEDs and enrolled in Northeast State Jr. College. They bought a typewriter as some of their papers needed to be typed. My mother allowed me to use the typewriter for my new book, and I was thrilled. When I had finished fifty pages of my novel, my parents read and took it to Dr. Richards, their English professor. They told me that she had liked it and it was good. Looking back, I believe my father’s reason for taking it to her was more for making himself look good. That’s what narcissists do. He never praised me at home for my work, but if he could somehow get the adoration of others for what I was doing, he took the recognition (and credit) for himself. That never stopped.

The next summer, when my older siblings came to visit, my father mentioned my book to them. Then he asked me to get it. Excited, I ran to my room and pulled the unbound manuscript from my dresser drawer and brought it back. I handed it to our father and sat on the couch. Then he began to read it aloud. I liked the idea of everyone hearing my story, and I was eager to get their reactions.

I was only eleven years old. There wasn’t any Internet. No spellchecker. I had a big dictionary and thesaurus but mistakes were still inevitable. As he read the story, and when he found mistakes, he capitalized on my errors, over and over again, in what was his mocking, subjugating tone. He made jokes at my expense and belittled me for my mistakes. Not once, but repeatedly. Bit by bit, he needled me, until finally he got bored and stopped reading. He handed me the book and I took it back to my room, trying not to show my emotions. His words stung and hurt. He hammered my aspiration into dust, right in front of my brothers and sisters. I stopped writing.

He offered no compliments for my work, but he made certain to point out the flaws. Don’t get me wrong. Errors need to be pointed out, but not in the manner he had done. I didn’t return to writing until after he and my mother divorced.

Years later, in 2007, after Predators of Darkness was published, I received an email via my publisher’s website. The sender’s name was ‘THE BOSS’. My father was still trying to assert dominance and control over me, but by this time, I’d already stood my ground against him several times and had spoken my mind. In his email, he’d stated that he had learned that I was having my first book signing at the Rainsville Public Library, and he was pleading to come. I don’t know why he even asked because it was an open event. He could have come regardless. Basically, that’s what I had told him. “Come if you want.” His insinuation of being THE BOSS said it all though.

He came to the signing, much to my surprise. After he arrived, I realized his sole purpose was to take over the signing, as if he had contributed to my writing skills, and without him, I’d have never been published. My cousin, Rita, must have picked up on this, and she pulled him to the side of the event and kept him busy in conversation for the duration of the signing, for which I am grateful.

Two years later, after Beyond the Darkness was published, I was invited to a large bookstore outside of Murfreesboro to join other authors in a book signing, but I had to provide paperbacks of my books. After the event, they’d compensate me and buy the rest at wholesale. I was thrilled for the opportunity and brought the agreed nine copies of each book. Since our father lived in Murfreesboro, he showed up with his wife. They brought with them the first copy of the book to get it signed. They came to my table and picked up the second book, had me sign it, too, and then they browsed the book shelves.

I had brought eighteen books total, and the lady who had invited me had counted the number of books before I entered the store. She had someone help us bring in the books. About midway through the event, she became sick and had to leave. After the signing, the manager met with me at the side counter and showed the receipts of the ones they had sold while I was there and his total came to seventeen books.

I shook my head. I brought eighteen books and the lady had counted them when I arrived. He seemed perturbed, like I was cheating them. I felt I was being shorted, but I was polite and asked him to call the lady because she could vouch for the numbers. He left and went to recount and came back again. The numbers on his part remained the same. Seventeen. While we discussed this, I glanced toward my father who seemed interested in our conversation, but he also seemed a little entertained by it as well. He had that sly grin that I should’ve paid more attention to; a grin that we as children had known when he was up to no good.

The man wrote me a check for the books, and I thanked him.

Acting concerned, my father approached me afterwards and asked what was going on. Were they trying to get out of paying me? I told him a book was missing, but they paid me.

I couldn’t understand how the book was missing, but I later figured it out. When my father went to the cash register to make their purchase, they bought some other items. The one book they had brought with them, and they showed me that copy when they picked up the second book. At the counter, however, he told the cashier they had brought BOTH books from home and wanted me to sign them. The second book in the series was the one that showed as shorted in the manager’s inventory. My father had lied to get a free book, probably thinking it wasn’t a big deal. It was. The bookstore had nothing else to do with me afterwards, not even the kind lady who had reached out and invited me to their store. This was a huge independent bookstore, too.

Had I any idea this had occurred at the time, I’d have simply not received payment for the book they couldn’t find. My wife and kids and I had traveled over eight hours to get there. I was exhausted, and since I knew how many books I had brought, I felt I was being shorted. Never did I think my father would have stolen the book right in front of me.

This incident, however, was one that placed further distance between my father and I. I’d always known he couldn’t be trusted, but this eyeopener meant I’d never let him know of future book signings. His theft killed my chances of having my books carried by that bookstore. But, this was just one of the ways our father treated us. Lies about almost anything were quite common, and he could never own up to something he had done wrong. Apologies were few from this man.

My oldest brother told us that he often got into trouble to protect us from our father’s wrath. He certainly faced a lot of scorn and hardships from our father when we were little. I’ve always looked up to Chris and wish we could have spent far more time together growing up. He used to tell me scary stories when I was little with the lights out, like older siblings often do. I don’t know why older kids like to scare the little ones, but it’s common. But, deep down when his tales frightened me, I knew he’d protect me. I felt safe because he is my big brother. I wish we were able to spend more time together now, as we are getting older, but we live about ten hours apart from one another.

Memories shape us. We each deal with the demons of our past in different ways. Emotional abuse might not ever truly be healed. The scars are the reminders. I’m not totally sure of how the others in my family dealt with theirs, but for me, writing has helped me heal. To cope. I’ve been working on my memoirs for over a month now, and I’ve finally gotten a better understanding for a lot of the bad times.

Family members outside of my immediate family have often told me to hush concerning these matters, as they’ve suffered in their own circles, too. Everyone has different coping methods. Mine is writing about them and sharing the experiences because my survival might help enable others to deal with theirs. The scars remind us of the injuries, but if you’re able to see the scars, you know that you’re a survivor, too.

Until next time ….