Upcoming Book

Raping the Lamb

Prologue

In a dark house, shuttered against prying eyes, a little girl cleans a table. Tiny, frail; she works with a stealth unnatural in one so young. She has learned to move without making a sound. It’s safer that way. 

She has many such skills, not that they offer her much protection. Sanctuary is only to be found in her head—in the recesses of imagination and make believe, where mothers sing softly to their daughters and snug them in at bedtime between fragrant sheets. She has had no such experience. Most little girls have bunnies or pink flowers scattered on their pajamas. Her night clothes are patterned with blood splatters—the seat, the chest, the hem of her ragged bottoms—all testify to her faults, her many crimes. They echo her mother’s jeering accusations-“If you weren’t such a liar”…”why do you make me do such things?”….why can’t I ever be good?”

In this rare moment—a reprieve. At times like this, she often dreams about the 100 acre wood with Pooh or that she is safe in a cabin with gentle Ma and Pa Ingalls, the snow falling softly on a sloping prairie.  This day she is Alice with an orange frock and white apron cleaning under jam jars and singing. In an instant, THAT voice that haunts her waking and sleeping, screeches, “What are you doing?” and she jumps, a jar crashing to the floor. She is puzzled as to what she has done wrong, but the woman known as mother believes if she jumped, she must be guilty—of something.

Dragged down the hall by her hair, hoisted up by her leg and arm and slung over a baby gate, she crashes into the closed bedroom door where he awakes. He listens to his wife railing about this current infraction and obeys orders to thrash the girl, choosing the long-handled shower brush as weapon. The child’s stomach clenches. Familiar with this routine, she obediently pulls down her culottes and underwear and sends her small arms into the air in total surrender, waiting for the blows. They begin reigning on her buttocks and lower back in rapid succession. She tries with the courage of a seasoned warrior to keep herself still and hold back the tears, knowing that if she fails, the scourging will be prolonged. 

To cry, to move, is to begin the count again. Twenty-five is the minimum. There is no maximum. Only when the enforcer is exhausted or when she is immovable and stoic will the beating stop.

At last, it is over and, the wife scolds the husband:  “See you have to make her lay there until she doesn't move and she doesn't need love taps from you the older she gets the harder it gets all she had to do was take 25 and she wound up taking 66 she's stubborn and you have to break her will she has to know that you the boss no matter how long it takes…

Esther remembers she was around five or six during this episode. Afterword, her dad left to teach the Bible or write a sermon or pray with somebody. Esther knew all about praying…she had been practicing for years.