Grim Rhapsody

When I was four years old, my father shot me. 

I know that it was not his fault. He asked me not to play on the new slide, but I disobeyed him. I didn’t listen to his warning about what would happen if I did. When he found me sitting on the patch of dirt at its foot, he sighed, but without hesitation pulled out his revolver and shot me in the stomach. 

Three weeks later, I came back home from the hospital. The incident was covered up. My father was a very influential man. Rumours floated around town, but they were not enough to puncture my father’s charitable image. Even I didn’t hold anything against him. But from then on I was always the girl with the scar. 

For my father’s birthday the following year, I painted my love for him a rock, even though he had asked for a wall of paintings. He didn’t like my rock. He said I should be more thankful to him. I tried to tell him that I couldn’t paint a wall. He said I would have no dinner that night, and I would be locked in the basement furnace if next year’s gift wasn’t to his liking. I knew that he was allowed to, because he was my father and I owed everything to him. 

When I started school, I had a nice teacher called Mr Lee. When he found out who my father was, he seemed sad and told me I could ask him for help if I was ever in trouble. So I told him that the previous month, my father had bought me a puppy, then told me to drown it. Crying and with trembling hands, I had lowered it into the bathtub, but as soon as it touched the water he had stopped me and said I could keep the puppy. 

I think Mr Lee told the principal, because the next day my father was very angry. He had me transferred to another class and said not to talk to any teachers about personal things again. I asked where my puppy was. My father told me that he had put her in the furnace, for my own good. I didn’t believe him. But I never saw my puppy again. 

For the ten years I was in school, my father gave me different lessons at home. He would give me rules that I hadn’t learned in school. The first thing he said was that I had to always love him, or he would punish me. He told me that I must spend one day each week at home with him to prove I loved him. He told me never to question him, and to hate anyone who did. He told me horrible things would happen to me if I ever disobeyed him. I was afraid. 

When I was sixteen, I made friends with another girl. Then one time something happened between us. My father found out, and whipped me. Then we packed up and left town. I was too scared to go near a girl again for a long time. 

My father owned a mansion in another town. There were a few families renting rooms in it. My father took their money and kicked them out, so we could live there. I saw a woman crying with her baby. There was nothing anyone could do. Except my father.

My father invited over some men he knew. They were all a lot older than me. He offered me to them as a wife. One of them accepted, and we became married. I had no choice. But I knew my father was doing what was best for me. 

The following month, our country went to war. The army was not afraid of defeat. My father’s company made their weapons. Their weapons were the best in the world. All my father asked in exchange for the weapons was that he chose which country was attacked. I heard stories about rivers of blood left in the army’s path. I heard stories about children impaled against rocks, and thrown off cliffs. I didn’t believe my father would let that happen, just so he could get more land.

When I was twenty, I finally parted with my father. He was too old to run his company, so he chose someone in his place while he lived in another country. He chose a man named Chris. Everyone agreed Chris was nicer than my father. When he came for dinner with the other company members, he would tell stories. Everyone looked up to him. He put some of the company’s funds into a new medicine. He saved some lives, but eventually became too busy. Sometimes I wondered if he could save more if he wanted to. 

Then the riots happened. There were riots against the company’s weapons, which had killed thousands of people. They attacked the main building. Chris was shot in the struggle. They attacked our mansion and I was forced by another man. 

My father returned to deal with the disaster. He and my husband hated me. They said I had committed adultery. They didn’t care that it wasn’t my fault. That I had no choice. My father had finally had enough. He grabbed me and pushed me into the furnace. I was in there for half a minute before someone pulled me out. 

I opened my blistered eyes, crying from the pain, and saw a squad of policemen. Two had my father handcuffed and pinned against the wall. One was calling for an ambulance. Another was telling my father that he had got away with crimes for too long, and would be tried for hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse, war crimes, and even more. My father received more than fifty life sentences in jail. He was only there for two years before he died.

I spent seven years receiving counselling for twenty years of what I learned had been terror on every level imaginable. I had bad scars all over my body from the burns, to join the one where my father had first shot me for being too curious. Despite that, I had opened my eyes to everything else. For the first time in almost thirty years, I tasted more freedom in the air than pain or fear. I knew that it wasn’t all lost.