Fractured

My grandfather on my father’s side, was a pecker-toothed sidle who raped his daughter when she was just ten. He threw down vodka from an eternal well and took my father out to buy prostitutes when he was just fifteen... It was here that my father first learned the true value of a woman. Mercifully, a permanent steel brace got loose at the Pennsylvania steel mill where he worked and crushed Grandfather into a pool of blood and urine. My father was a dried seed rattling in an empty gourd… he had grown up hardened with leather-stiff roots exposed too long in the sun. My mother knew that he wanted to rape me, so I kept guard with knives and ran away whenever I could. I went to bed fantasizing how to sneak into his bedroom and kill him with the kitchen carving knife. My older brother hadn’t adjusted well to the chaos either, so he put all his expectations and dreams into a matchbook and burned down three houses in the neighborhood. He secretly, robbed his friends of their valuable coin collections. He grew weary and confessed and was taken to a local Mental Hospital for evaluation. At fourteen, I needed a good stiff drink! I was transferred to two different foster care homes and grew up like a weed. My mother Dolly was an auburn haired porcelain bisque, matt finished doll from a discriminating collections of dolls... her father's dolls. She was not a witty woman but silent, afraid and alone. She gave birth to three children who grew up like wild dogs while Dolly made Betty Crocker weekends and otherwise TV dinners until she grew tired... very tired. One day the brothers were playing with Dolly tossing her back and forth… like a ball, one to another... until we dropped her. Fragile, she shattered into pieces on the gray cement patio. My father came out determined to put the pieces back together but clumsily, he repeatedly stepped on Dolly crushing the refined fragments into powdered dust.