Surely a victim of sexual abuse doesn’t ever enjoy it! Surely someone raised in a system of abuse wouldn’t learn to calculate, expect and even demand learned responses from their abuser! Surely if you hit the hungry monkeys and cycle them through they won’t learn to beat the newest one because he dared to reach for the banana.
By twelve…maybe thirteen, she had already become a master of using that guilty look in the ole’ man’s eyes as blackmail. She could always tell on him, the ole’ man was pretty sure she never would, but she could and she took frequent license to remind him that she just might. The math was simple, she knew he would never stop doing those things to her so she might as well get pretty, petty things for herself out of the deal. Wasn’t she owed at least that much?
In the dream his hand digs tighter into her scalp while his other hand pinches her mouth shut until it feels like her whole face might pop like a zit. He explodes inside of her and collapses, leaving her entirely helpless and unable to breath pinned beneath him. She’s sure this is it, the moment he’ll keep his hand locked over her face long enough, use his weight too long in the wrong way. Finally, an end to all of it, her mother would be sad for a while but it wouldn’t destroy the whole family like the truth would.
An eternity of waiting goes by in dream time before the ole’ man rolls off, using her comforter to wipe himself off like he always did. There’s no need to wonder what must have been going through her mind at twelve…maybe thirteen, after all she knows, she was there. “At least it was me tonight, and not my little brother.”
She sees the old beat up suitcase, bought second hand sitting in the closet in her dream and remembers the time she spent at summer camp, that would have been the year, twelve, she was twelve in the dream without a doubt. The old man griped and pissed and moaned about working all that overtime but she finally got to go to camp with her friend from school. She paid it forward for months up until that glorious trip, her month away from the little green house on Hallmark Ave.
It isn’t even the ugly, miserable scene that unfolds in her nightmare that wakes her up clawing at her face, a screen caught in her throat. She was feeling herself slip subconsciously into her broken memories of Councilor Duggen and her time at camp kiddy porn.
No! Not that, not now, not tonight, not back to back. No double features of betrayal and misery.
Hanna shudders awake, her hands pressing against her face, a litter of stillborn screams stuck in her throat...