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For whatever reason, in my simmering, internal rage, I started cataloging those types of things.
Broken arm.
Busted nose.
Split lip.
Choking bruises on her throat.
Broken rib.
Black eye.
The list grew and grew as I did as well, shooting up over six feet before I was even fifteen, filling out wide by the time I did, making me tower a few inches over my father, have a body that could hide his.
And then it happened.
I was woken out of sleep by a crash and my mother's screaming.
But it cut off.
Mid-scream, it went eerily silent in my home.
I could tell by the churning in my stomach and the racing of my heartbeat that something was wrong, terribly, awfully wrong.
I shot out of my bed, storming into my parents' room, flinging open the door so hard that it cracked against the wall, making my father shock back from the prone form of my mother on the floor, blood making a halo around her head. Free of her scarf, her hair was spread over the floor like a painting, thick, shining, and long. I wasn't sure I had ever seen all of her hair before.
Beautiful.
It was beautiful.
But it was slick with blood from a gash on the side of her head where it had collided with the edge of the dresser when my father had pushed her there.
"No!" I had roared, rushing over toward her, but you could see it in her wide open, dark, unseeing eyes that, yes, she was gone.
The rage boiled for a moment, then oddly cooled.
Cold.
I was ice fucking cold.
I moved to stand, turning on my father who looked stricken.
But his shock wasn't good enough.
Even his repeated chants of sorry weren't good enough.
That night, I became the man I would continue to be for decades after.
That night, I became the judge, jury, and executioner.
I became the champion for women who couldn't champion themselves.
Broken arm.
Busted nose.
Split lip.
Choking bruises on her throat.
Broken rib.
Black eye.
Those words coursed through me as I reached for my father, his frame brought weak by age and lack of work no competition for my youthful brawn.
Broken arm.
Busted nose.
Split lip.
Choking bruises on her throat.
Broken rib.
Black eye.
"Fac asta in numele, Ioana."
This is in the name of Ioana.
My mother.
And then I did it.
Broke his arm.
Busted his nose.
Split his lip.
Choked bruises into his throat.
Broke his rib.
Blackened his eye.
Then, when I had shown him what he had done to her all those years when she was at his mercy, I gave him her ending as well.
Unlike my mother, there was nothing beautiful about the blood that haloed around his head.
I stood there for so long that my legs felt like they locked up, before the sun started shining, and I knew that I needed to handle the situation.
I wrapped my mother's body in the beautiful blankets she had gotten as a wedding present from her family, taking her out into the garden she had tended so dutifully, keeping me alive all those years as my father sucked the life out of her. I dug a grave, and I put her to rest.
I packed everything useful we had, and I left.
My father?
He rotted in that house.
And no one missed him.
Fully aware of my actions, of the illegality of them, I traveled as far and as fast as I could.
I broke into the Ukraine where I found odd jobs. I got myself nourished, stronger, older.
Two years I spent there, making my way across mostly by foot, going through countless pairs of shoes with my relentless walking.
Then, of course, I found myself in Russia.
Coming off of the financial crash that happened a year before, sending the country into a depression that made the one in the States during the thirties look like a pleasure cruise, the country was in a time of change, of upheaval.
As it always did, collapse, even as temporary as the one in Russia, made crime go wild.
Organized crime, especially.
I had barely been in the country for a year when I was approached by a brigadier, the Russian equivalent of an Italian mafia captain.
"You. I hear your name," he told me, speaking English though everything about me screamed Romanian.
"Me? No one hears my name," I countered, taking the vodka the bartender passed toward me, preparing myself for a long walk to the next town, on the run again. Two weeks before, I had come across some fuckhead in an alley, pants down, trying to rip the pants down a girl who couldn't have been more than thirteen years old.
Her face was wet with blood.
Knocked out molar.
Busted lip.
Broken eye socket.
The girl ran, crying, hopefully getting home safely.
As I knocked out a molar, busted a lip, smashed an eye socket.
I didn't even seem to think before I did it.
I never did.
I just moved down the alley, noting the injuries. The decision had been made when I came upon the scene.
