Playing (this could be disturbing, if abuse disturbs you, don't read it)

Playing, that’s all she should be doing. Age five, pig tails and toys, popsicles on hot days, selling Kool Aid, Having friends, these are the things she should know and love. But that was not to be; her life became nightmarish in a single transaction. The older brother, who should have been protecting her, was working to destroy her, and it is not clear if he knew how much it would destroy her.
He wanted baseball cards, something his family could not afford to let him buy. So he makes a trade; baseball cards for the sister. He makes this trade with a teen aged boy. He has been hurt by someone else, raped and left to deal with the feelings on his own. He never told. He made sure the sister wouldn’t tell by threatening to kill her cat. She knew he would do it. She watched him “dissect” a goldfish while it was still alive.
The boy takes his sister by the hand, a gesture that should have been comforting, but wasn’t. It was threatening and scary to be touched by him in anyway. He had beaten her so many times; leaving bruises that no one paid attention to. He was a bully. He bullied other kids in the neighborhood, but his sister was his main target. So he takes her hand, and she feels cold and slimy inside; he leads her to the house two doors down, rings the bell and runs away leaving her standing on the front porch too scared to move.
The teen, Lowell, opens the door. He immediately pulls the girl into the house, gripping her arm tightly, too tightly, scaring her even more. At this point she is terrified and paralyzed with fear, she couldn’t run away. He takes her through the house to the back door, and out into the yard. There is a big tree; she can see it has a tree house of sorts built into it. He tells her in a hissing whisper directly into her ear, “Climb the ladder.” She was shaking, but she made her way up to the platform of the tree house. Lowell followed her.
She was wearing a dress; she was always in dresses because her father didn’t want her to wear pants. She loved the jeans she had, hand-me-downs from the evil older brother. She would occasionally sneak into the brother’s room and borrow his clothes to dress up like a boy to go out and play. This was not one of those days because the father was home, so a dress it was.
Lowell reaches up inside her dress and rips down and off the cotton panties she always wore. He touched her, there, in between her legs. It didn’t feel good in her mind, but her body had a mind of its own and the touch felt tingly, kind of exciting. He stroked her there, and the more he did the more excited and scared she got. And then he changed, no more stroking, he opened his pants and pulled out his penis. It was ugly, purplish and red. She had seen her brother’s penis, but it was tiny, this one was huge. He pushed her legs apart with his knees and then he took his hand down to guide the penis into her. As he entered it burned, it hurt; she started to cry out, he covered her mouth with his hand and said, “Shut the fuck up.” She shut up. Tears rolled down her face as blood ran down into her ass crack. Deeper and deeper he pushed into her until he could go no further. She hoped that would be it, but it wasn’t. He began to pull and push, humping up and down; pain exploded in her. And then he groaned and stopped, but stayed on top of her, making it hard to breathe. Eventually he rolled off of her. He told her to leave, “get out of here whore.” She had no idea what a whore was, but she wasn’t waiting to ask.
Running home, without her panties, blood on her legs, terrified that she be chased, she stumbled and fell, skinning her knees. She hurt “There” so bad, and there were splinters in her butt. When she got to the house that was her home, she ran to the bathroom. There she filled the tub with the hottest water she could stand, undressed and got in the tub. The water turned pink from the blood. Carefully, but fully, she washed every part of her that he had touched. So far it seemed as if no one knew she had been gone, or that she had returned and jumped into the tub.
After her bath, feeling as clean as she could, she went across the hall to her room and put on fresh cotton panties. She put on a dress, and under the dress, over her panties, she put on a pair of shorts. It was the first time she had ever worn shorts under her dress, but it became a permanent thing. More barriers meant more safety to her.
The brother, evil brother, came into her room and asked her what Lowell had done to her. He had a sick need to hear the details. She knew resisting him was useless because a beating would follow any refusal to spill the story. She told it all to him. He listened with an excited look on his face. Nasty feelings of guilt for not trying to get away were floating inside her head. Strangely she asked him to help her get the splinters out of her butt, because she couldn’t ask her mom to do it. He remover the splinters, and then he touched here “there” making it dirtier and weirder to let him see her body, she moved out of reach of his touch and quickly pulled up the panties and shorts. And then it was over, or so she thought.
That night she could not sleep, every time she closed her eyes her mind saw Lowell. This would be the beginning of many sleepless nights. Sleep had become an unsafe place to be. She still bleeding, and afraid it would never stop. She changed her panties more than once in the night, finally she folded a washcloth and put it in her panties.
She never told anyone, but the next night, when her mom was getting her ready for bed, the mother saw the bruises, but ignored them. Ignorance would be the excuse later in life when the girl did tell, the mother would plead ignorance. Lies, everyone lied. It was the rule; don’t tell the truth about the bad stuff. Don’t tell about the hitting, the yelling. Ignore the police taking mom out of the bathroom where she had taken a handful of some kind of pills. It didn’t happen. Ignore the cruelty. Ignore it all.
Playing is all she should have had to worry about, but playing was just a convenient escape from the realities of pain and torture. The brother traded her many times to older boys to obtain this or that thing he wanted. He always wanted the details. He often touched her; he even watched a few times when he had traded her to some boy.
She no longer felt like the same person. She had to be someone else for her parents, and someone different for the brother, and yet again someone else when she was being raped. She began to feel wormy and disgusting inside, as though she had been invaded by worms and bugs. She felt dirty and guilty. She knew she must have done something to deserve this, but she could never understand what it was she had done. In her mind this was just how it was and she was powerless to stop it. Imagination was all she had left, and often she would fall silent and still because she was some place in her head where no one could reach her. In time she would begin to write these stories, write poems, but she kept her writing secret, it was hers and hers alone. In her life at home she lived in fear and difficulty, terror and rage, but in her head she lived in a world or her choosing, away from those who hurt her.
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