Rape Tropes
Forced to perform cunnilingus for my aunt when I was just 2 years old (why did she do that to me?)I went on to marry the son of an incest perpetrator while I was only 16. Cause to effect?

A couple of nights ago I slept badly late into the morning. In my half sleep it was like I was acting in a horror movie.

Severely understates it to call it a nightmare: seeing and hearing my father-in-law, when he was skidding into the depths of one of his regularly occuring depressions. Much worse was watching while he very slowly and deliberately climbed the slow treacherous crests of his mania.

I have tried with no success to forget his laughter as it echoed from the rough surfaces of the bare, shadowed concrete block walls. It was a bald and brutal sound, signaling serious danger, insane guffaws sliding up and down my spine.

“Joycie!” He would call out to his daughter, from the corner bedroom. His voice smug, punctuated with an ugly sporadic laughter, a manipulative disgusting keening of lust. Her eyes widening in terror she would go to him, compelled by that manic power, she went to the sound of his voice.

After disappearing into his room I could hear his chuckles of pleasure. Resembling noises made by severely retarded humans. Animalistic, low, gutteral, thoroughly chilling self-indulgence, onanistic groans lingering in the air like acrid smoke rising from repeated gunshots leveled very near until his family, severally, cowered in the other rooms like rabbits.

They had no hot water in the house he had built for them. There was a pump on the back porch, outside, that was the only source of water. The porch was uncovered, as well, so Ruth, wife of Clair, was forced to carry in water by the bucket after she ploddingly pumped it, even in the dead of winter. Sometimes she would ask her sons to get it, sometimes I would volunteer to get some for her, but Clair had given her to know that it was principally her job, a wife's task.

Bath night was usually Saturday, four buckets of water on the electric stove they would share the tub, that is, the father was the first to bathe and his wife would follow. The children would have their turns in the resulting water according to the dictates of the father. The fucking dictator.

Imagine being incested by a man and then not being able to bathe until the end of the week and then only in his dirty bath water.

God help us, this is humanity?