Beginnings · Childhood
Date: 29 September 2026
Content note: sexual material seen by a child.
My brother and I collected monster stickers that came with bubblegum. Every Saturday we patronized the local store and procured as many packs as we could afford. We feasted on the gum and bedecked our chest of drawers with the stickers: ogres with drooling fangs, swamp creatures with tentacles, and lycanthropes mid-howl. We covered every inch. We were proud of it.
Then my grandfather died. My mother went to France. My brother went to military school. My sister went to finishing school. I went to South Padre Island to live with my grandmother’s hairdresser. When the family hospitalized my mother following her threats to chop us all up, a pale, sickly friend of Grandfather’s held all our belongings.
Grandmother
When my mother came out of the hospital, my grandmother wanted us to move into a mobile home in the Rio Grande Valley. It wasn’t South Padre. It wasn’t anywhere nice. My mother wouldn’t hear of it.
“She wants wall-to-wall carpet,” my guardian said.
They stored our furniture in that mobile home, and we went there to collect it. The heat inside was stifling. There was no air, only a wet, heavy fug that stuck to my skin and smelled of mosquito repellent.
They draped a sheet over the chest of drawers. The monsters were still there, curling at the corners in the damp. I ran my fingers over each one and remembered every Saturday with my brother.
Then I opened the drawers. Every one was stuffed to the top with magazines. I flipped through them. I had seen naked people in National Geographic, but that was normal, and this was not. I felt sick. I closed the drawers, one by one, and I didn’t say anything.
The rest of that day I can’t recall anymore. What I remember is the smell of the insect repellent, the air I couldn’t breathe, and the shock.
I was ten. I never told anyone. Not my mother. Not my grandmother. Not even my brother, who had helped me decorate that chest with monsters.
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