Prelude

As the world begins to crumble the true identity of individuals shall be revealed. In this moment you can see a person's true structure and feelings.

Whether they be spineless cowards or stern brave-hearts. It is in this moment, the moment that a man is at his weakest, that you truly see what he is made of.

What is a father that aims to tear down and destroy the one thing he built? What is a father that rips apart the spawn of himself?

He is not a father; he is the spawn of evil itself. To nurture and to build is a father's true obligation to his son, to do the opposite is considered nothing short of murderous of that connection.

Torment and anguish are Satan's greatest assets, is it so hard to imagine a world hidden within a 7-year-old boys head where there is a connection between his father and Satan?

Devastation smothers this world in a thick smog, preventing the intake of a full life span, without pain and heartache.

The constant struggle of parents inflicting pain upon their own spawn is the true nature of this unjust society to which people perch themselves upon.

10:00pm: the predetermined time for that act. I was never consoled over the contract, however there was surely no loophole in order to exterminate this arrangement.

I was stuck in the deep of it, submerged beneath the sheer mass of pain and punishment that had become a daily routine for myself.

The door of my bedroom swung open, as it would every night, and in it lay a silhouette - Oleander himself.

After having lost the right for me to call him father the moment he made me believe this was an acceptable way to raise his own son, the only name I would call him was his birth one.

Though, if not me, then it would have surely been the younger copy of myself – which was beyond unacceptable.

The shadow began to creep from wall to wall, edging ever closer to the solace of my bed with every leap it made.

My mind would accelerate, pondering on every thought of which torturous method he would exploit to his pleasure this time.

On this occasion, the belt violently ripped from the polyester rings that bound it to his waist until, eventually, the entire mass of the belt hung vertical.

As a 7-year-old boy, I had accepted and, to some degree, even relished in the pain. The pain reminded me of my goals in life and the reason I took this punishment in the first place.

With every catastrophic blow from the leather weapon of choice, that connected with various parts of my body, my eyes clenched ever harder onto the cascade of tears that wear more than tempted to scale the ridges of my cheeks. I would not cry.

I would not give him the pleasure of satisfaction. Instead, my hands would coil around my blanket of solitude as he would deliver brutal blow after blow, severely marking and degrading my innocent skin.

Grasping ahead, I vowed to never end up like this again, or to turn out like Oleander himself. This is the story of how I failed.