The Violence

by Delilah S. Dawson

I swore I’d never let a woman be preyed upon in any business I was tied up in. Even if I was the one causing the problem.

Over the past few years, it began to feel as if all her sentences ended on question marks, because it’s easier to take back a question than a statement with a man like David.

He’s a good man, she realizes. And not because anyone is watching. He just is.

Apparently standing up for yourself and asking for what you want actually works when the other party’s not a narcissistic asshole.

There’s a hollow feeling in her chest, knowing she has to leave this comfort and strike out on her own into the unknown.

“Why are you guys being so nice to me?” They exchange a wry glance, but it’s Leanne who answers. “Because we were both lost and fucked up when we were your age, and if just one person had reached out, it would’ve meant the world.”

she dreads every time she has no choice but to drive past this haunted hellhole, knowing full well that in the best of times, what she saw there made her furious on behalf of women,

wow the promise if a man suprising the lady of the house with new carpet enraged her that much eh?

That’s one nice thing about Florida—the worst thunderstorms bring the most beautiful and surprising rainbows.

Her biggest fear isn’t that she won’t be able to find her mother. It’s that she’ll learn that her mother doesn’t want to be found.

Patricia is fairly certain that the monster haunting her poor granddaughter is a he, not an it, and that it’s doing everything it can to claw its way back into the child’s life.

She held Chelsea away, tried to make her daughter strong, but she’s accidentally engineered a relationship in which she is the perpetual goddamn monster.

Patricia never told her daughter that David made a pass at her once, when she was younger, telling her she and Chelsea could be sisters and he could barely tell them apart, a knowing gleam in his eye and his thumb playing over her bare shoulder.

“The thing about changing is that first, you have to want to change. And change is uncomfortable. To decide to change and then follow through with it and then maintain it is the work of a lifetime.”

He could’ve simply put an ad on Craigslist. Wanted: Broodmare, doormat, and punching bag. Free room and board, but you’ll pay for it with pieces of your soul.

Instead, she simply types, New phone. Who dis?

Lmao

Love, hate, it’s all the same, and it’s better than indifference.

“That wasn’t the Violence,” she says, so softly no one else can hear. “That was me.”

Nana is dating Steve, the VFR wrestler who looks like a banker, and actually seems to love him.

Lol okay then go on then, Pattie. Instead of shipping him with her daughter, she gets with him herself.

Ella emailed Leanne for some names, and now Tara and Pedro travel along with the VFR in their own motor home and vaccinate as many people as they can, as many people as want