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(TW: child abuse) Contrary to rumor, I hadn’t the slightest inkling about the true source of the garbage smell when I was growing up. I believed my father when he told me it was just the pipes in the walls. You see, I had a very ordinary girlhood, playing with other children in our quiet little cul-de-sac in our sleepy neighborhood shaded by oak and sycamore trees. There were whispers, of course, of a predator. And an undercurrent of fear. But like most children, I remained blissfully secure in my certainty that the adults in my life would protect me. Indeed, in all my wildest imaginings, I couldn’t have conceived that behind my father’s gentle smile was a man who could murder my playmates in cold blood, chop apart their bodies, and stash them behind the walls.
But there were signs.
He kept an axe downstairs in the basement—always sharp, yet we had no chimney or fireplace or any wood to chop.
Our home underwent frequent renovations to “fix” leaky pipes or add improvements like false walls. Strangely, it was often after these adjustments that a rank, rotting odor would permeate.
When my father finally confessed, I learned that the murders began long before my first memories of the disappearances. Began before I was born, in fact.
It was my mother who was afflicted.
***
He never knew where the affliction came from. Just that after I was born—mere days after, in fact—she tried to strangle me. He saved me just in time, and she was hospitalized for postpartum psychosis. My father bottle-fed me, my sole caretaker during my mother’s intensive treatment.
She came back restored, and their lives returned to the normal joy of newlyweds with a cherished infant…
… until the evening he found her bleeding out in the bathtub, and me unresponsive, drowned beside her.
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