The Son of Tyrants, Part I

I was born in far Morsania, a small, backwater Eurasian state, known to most folk in this wide world for my grandfather’s prodigious hate. My given name is Jocefeus, but I mostly go by Joe these days, because that tyrant grandpa and I unfortunately share a name. I have no real memory of him, I was a baby when my mom left, only learned later his many crimes: genocide, mass rape, and great theft. He’s taxed the Morsanian people dry to live out his depraved lifestyle, snatched women to be his concubines until too broken to defile. Five hundred thousand people he killed through starvation, work camps, or purge. His sons, my uncles, were just as bad, killed and raped when they got the urge. But he also had a daughter too, for she is the mother of me, some claim that he did the deed himself, so great was his depravity… Of course I knew nothing of that until I was well out of my youth, and decided that I should never look into whether this was truth. Lucky for me, I got to grow up in the good ol’ American way, since my mother stowed in a freight train, in Morsania she would not stay. When she found a U.S. embassy she begged for them to let us in, promise that she would spill all her guts, that she would tell them everything. That’s how we gained our asylum, it was quite the intelligence coup, grandpa did rage, but with the U.S. he was wise enough not to screw. So I was raised, quite loved and quite safe, just a happy American kid, me and ma then got citizenship, and she openly cherished it. I even enlisted at age eighteen, I did two tours and then mustered out, at twenty-three I then asked myself: “What does life have in store for me now? Got a job working in logistics and met a fine girl named Lorelei, it was infectious for two fast years... all the love that I saw in her eyes. Before long we had gotten engaged, but before the trip to the altar, I decided she needed to know so at dinner I spoke those hard words. I wasn’t sure what I should expect, she just looked up, disgusted with me, tried to explain I had been a babe, but her face just screwed up with fury. She called me ‘killer,’ then she stormed out, I felt as if I had been run through, she didn’t seem me as a person, didn’t fit in with her point-of-view. Making things worse, she went to the press! She grave them the exclusive scoop, about her time spent with a ‘monster,’ it threw my whole world for a loop... CONCLUDES IN PART II