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Date: 10 October 2026
Content note: a parent’s violence and threats, neglect.
This answer begins in The Fear That Never Stopped.
Describe the room you went to when you wanted to be left alone. Where was the light coming from?
I never had a refuge. No Star Wars duvet, no portal I could seal to protect me while I read X-Men comics. My mother didn’t believe in closed doors. It was a corner room with bunk beds for when my brother visited.
When she left the house, I exhaled. When she was home, I faked privacy the only way I could: immersion in my Apple II and my favorite vice, my collection of pirated games.
During one particularly vicious fight, I fled to my room and locked the door.
“Oh, I see, you’re going to make me break down the door? Don’t you worry, I’ll get you!”
She got a hammer as she belted out her version of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” In her adaptation, she didn’t wash him out. She castrated him.
American doors aren’t doors at all; they’re basically cardboard with a doorknob stapled on. It was a hollow-core door, and I was an idiot who thought I could hide behind it. The hammerhead punched straight through. She tore through it easily. No splinters.
Her arm shoved through the holes, groping for the knob. Then came her face, poking through the ragged cardboard with a twisted grin, hissing, “I’m going to get you and cut those balls of yours off.”
Eventually, as always, she tired. She collapsed into sobs at the top of the stairs. From banshee to broken child in under five minutes. That was my cue to act: play therapist, hug her, pat her back, and whisper whatever lies might keep the peace. I unlocked the door and sat down next to her, listening to her heavy breathing.
Then the voice returned.
“You’re nothing but a loser, and I wish I’d never had you.
“You’re worthless. You think all women are weak? Fine, then, I’ll do it sneakily. I’ll get you. Maybe I’ll poison you. That’s a good idea. If more women killed men, then men would behave.”
She paused for breath. I thought surely it was over. It wasn’t.
“Sometimes I ask myself how you could be my son. You’re a maggot. I wish I could squash you.”
Even though she tricked me every time, it was hard to keep my guard up. I’d believe the storm had passed, that surely we were finally good.
She grabbed a pencil and drove it into my wrist. Clean, fast, deliberate. Left a scar, a perfect little circle. If someone asked about it, I’d say it was self-inflicted. And in a way it was. The injury came from a part of me that briefly believed that I was safe.
The door was never replaced. For years, day and night, the light from the hallway came into my room through the holes she’d gouged in it, every time she went to the toilet. Then we were evicted, and the door stayed behind.
What could you hear from your bed at night?
The house was silent at night. No boyfriends, no late visitors, no phone calls. My mother read. Eventually I’d hear her haul herself up the stairs to bed and let out a long sigh. The day had ravaged her.
Storms were the exception. The trees thrashed against each other all night, and water roared out of the drainpipes. By morning the bayous had burst their banks, and the floodwater carried the city’s trash out to the Gulf. For days afterward, the Bayou City smelled of peaceful rot and belligerent growth.
What part of the house did you avoid, and why?
The kitchen. Dishes leaned in towers in the sink. In the pantry, a sack of potatoes had gone to rot, shrunk and wrinkled inside their skins and furred with dark spores. Their pale shoots crawled down toward the gap under the door, as if trying to get out. The cockroaches no longer scurried away; it had become their domain. There were no drawings on the fridge. Just filth.
At some point we stopped fighting it and surrendered the room. We lived on Church’s, Jack in the Box, and Popeyes.
