Page 40 of Dolly

My mother is naked and on her knees. Her hair is pulled into pigtails, her mouth full of my father’s cock. The television on my desk plays an episode of my past I want wiped from my memory. I’m in the same position on the screen.

“What the fuck!” My dad sees us first and stumbles back a step. Mom falls forward to her hands, twisting her head to see who’s intruded on their playtime.

“Gabby?” Mom’s eyes widen. “How are you here?”

“Mom…” Words are lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue. I can’t seem to keep my eyes from wandering to the screen.

Ken steps forward, blocking my view.

“Who the fuck are you?” Daddy demands, straightening to his full height, pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Gabby, come here.” He points to the floor next to him.

I step closer to Ken’s back, drawing in his power. He’s not going to let anything happen to me.

“This is what you do now that you sold her?” Ken moves toward my mother, aiming his knife at her. “You get dressed up like your daughter so he can relive raping her?”

Mom scrambles to her feet. “No…”

Ken points to the television. “No? Really?” He marches over to the desk, and in one powerful swing, brings the cleaver down into the television, cracking the flat screen. Another hit, and the picture goes blue. He takes aim at the CD player the video is playing from and destroys it in one hit.

“Gabby! Tell him to stop,” Mom urges me, panic and anger mingling together in her demand. “Tell him that’s not what happened.”

I turn my head from the mess Ken made to my parents, huddling close together, naked and flaccid. Daddy has lost weight. His skin sags around his middle. Or has it always? The big man I remember, the strong, powerful father looming over my bed as I slept, isn’t the same man in my bedroom now. Maybe he never has been. Maybe it was my fear making him larger than life.

“You didn’t care.” I wiggle my toes inside the sneakers. “You let him so you could watch later?” I scream, making her jump.

“Gabby—”

“Don’t call me that!” I yell at Daddy, covering my ears with my hands. The gun slips from my grasp.

Daddy shoves Mom to the ground and lunges for it, but Ken is quicker, stronger, smarter. He’s already anticipated my father’s moves and he’s ready.

A shot rings out, echoing in my ears. Daddy falls at my feet, blood spraying from his left wrist.

I can’t hear Mom’s yelling over Daddy’s wails. Stepping over Daddy, I go to Mom.

“What are you saying?” I ask, cupping my ear and tilting my head. “I can’t hear you.” The ringing bounces between her words.

“Don’t hurt him,” she yells in my face.

Don’t hurt him. Had she ever spoken those three little words in my defense? Had she ever once begged him not to hurt me when he was angry—or worse, when he wasn’t? Did she fall to bended knee, pleading for mercy for her only child, her young daughter?

My fist lands in the middle of her face, and blood spurts out her nose, splattering my sweatshirt.

“Gabby!” Daddy shouts from where he lays on the floor, holding his wrist. Ken stands over his huddled form, the gun pointed at him.

“Lie on the bed.” Ken points to my mother. She’s holding her nose and shaking her head. “Do it now or I’m going to shoot him again,” Ken threatens, but I know he won’t. Daddy knows something, and until he tells us, he’ll live.

But Mom doesn’t know that.

“Okay…okay…” She climbs onto my bed, still covered in the same soft pink comforter and white pillows as when I lived here. It’s only been months, but the memories feel like a lifetime ago.

Ken points to Daddy’s belt lying on the floor. “Use that to bind her wrists,” he instructs me. It isn’t hard. Daddy did it to me a lot of times. I wrap the leather around her wrists, then through the buckle, until she’s strapped tight and can’t get her hands out. She doesn’t try to talk to me, but her eyes are begging, pleading for a mercy I was never granted.

Ken kicks Daddy until he’s on his back, then crouches near his face, dangling the cleaver over his nose.

“You sent a video to those fat fucks you sold her to. An audition? Or maybe you were selling the sessions?” Ken presses the edge of the knife to Daddy’s nose.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Daddy answers in a panic.

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