Madison Bastard by Sophia Dunn-Walker

That morning was not like other times David had come home drunk. I went downstairs to a freezing kitchen to find the door left open with the knob torn off. The first winter storm of the year bolted through the house. I struggled with the door as shards of ice hit my face and rays of the rising sun spilled in. The amber rays slashed through the pitch black of the windowless kitchen. In one great push, I shut out the storm with the light. The wind protested in defeat, screeching louder from the outside. I turned on a gas lamp to find a broken whiskey bottle, the table knocked over, and David’s leather belt on the floor at the bottom of the stairwell leading up
to the three bedrooms on the second level.

I was protective of David, my youngest brother. We lived together in an abandoned home in the North part of town next to Lake Michigan, the great lake that brought storms earlier than they were meant to come. David was a disgraced drunk and I was a professor with a bastard child. I liked sciences as they allowed me to grasp the truth in a world that didn’t make sense to
me. I had given all of myself to my career as the first female professor to teach medical school.

My father said that David was too emotional, and I wasn’t emotional enough. I dreamt of running for office like my father. I dreamt of adventure. I dreamt of a life free of rules and judgment and physical limitations. I had no friends in the town, except for David. As a boy he had a delicate feminine beauty and a shy and mysterious aura. His curly red hair always partially covered his gray eyes. A gray that looked as if another color had been torn out. Like our mother, he was ever oscillating between a soft demeanor and an animal one. The Great War brought out a side of him that had always been there. He was becoming increasingly domineering and violent.

He drank every morning until he couldn’t remember who he was. David would beat me as if it was something he was called to do by God. When I would come to him with blackened eyes he looked back at me in shame. He knew what he had done to me, but he could never put it into words. Even as he did this, I felt the need to protect him. David was a victim of his own mind and memory. A vulnerable boy who had been overtaken by a demon. The ritual of him coming home drunk and beating me alleviated my guilt. I didn’t deserve the career I had. I didn’t deserve to bring life into the world. Everyone told me it was unnatural for women to be the way I was, and I believed them. I accepted my fate.

And then, that night, the night of the first winter storm, he did not come back down for me. He remained upstairs. Dread crept through me where relief should have been. Through the ceiling, I heard the stifled screams of my daughter. I could take a hit but my daughter, Georgia, just nine years old, could not. This was the first night I heard him rape her. It was something I heard but never saw. I could not bear to look at it. I do not know why I did not stop him. For everything I had fought for and would fight for in life, I did not fight then, and I will never be able to explain to you why. I was frozen in that scarcely illuminated kitchen. This would be the moment that created you. You, like your mother, were born out of an act of brutality. You, as beautiful as you are, are the nightmare that the women in our family cannot wake up from.

I took Georgia to Chicago the following week. I left no note for my family, or for the university. I did not tell David. Georgia and I took the train to Chicago where we would begin a new life.

About Stories Matter: Stories Matter is a mentoring program founded by writer Leslie Zemeckis, and co-sponsored by the SBIFF and ENTITY Magazine, for young female writers, nurturing and inspiring the next generation of writers to tell their stories. A weekly intensive where published female authors give their time to encourage and share their writing process. These are the best of the bunch, some remain works-in-progress, and some will (hopefully) take these stories and turn them into longer pieces.