Wake Up Butterfly #4

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WARNING

This chapter contains offensive content involving animal abuse, sadism, rape, and childhood sexual abuse. The author acknowledges that this content may trigger, but lived truths are lived truths. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ray informed me that I'd be heading back out to work shortly after the birth of our second son.

We were apparently in desperate need of the cash for a beach house he had been scoping out somewhere down in Texas, some "once in a lifetime" deal he had worked out with a real estate developer the recession hadn't been particularly kind to.

The guy was apparently liquidating all his remaining assets on the cheap so that he could move down to Bali to live out the rest of his days in something that wasn't complete and total abject poverty. Which lets face it: for a guy like him, was probably nothing more than a McMansion with three bathrooms instead of the usual five.

Could the truly well off – the people grandfathered into it by way of the winds of good luck and a strong family name – ever truly end up as down and out as someone like me and Ray?

I didn't think so.

How could I believe such a wayward fallacy when nothing I had thus far witnessed had given me the impression that life worked the same for the supremely, opulently rich as it did the rest of us lowly peasants?

"You and the boys would get the guest house, there," Ray explained, scrolling through the pictures in an email from the developer on our clunky Windows 2000 desktop computer and gesturing at the screen.

He said it as if that was somehow very generous of him to offer, as if the main house didn't have a whooping six bedrooms, three bathrooms, and an ocean view to die for compared to the tiny wooden structure that was the guest house.

Noticing my skepticism, Ray added, "you'll barely ever have to see me," which now that I really thought about it...didn't sound like that bad of a prospect after all.

Shouldn't I have been jumping for joy at this news? Wasn't being left alone by Ray exactly what I had been praying so long and so hard for?

"Really?" I was suddenly hopeful.

No...I was more than hopeful. I was elated beyond all belief!

An entire space of my own, away from Ray and his clan of meddling child prostitutes, where the boys and I could, for the first time in our short lives together as a family, live in relative peace and quiet without having to walk on eggshells 24/7 in fear of cellar beatings...or worse.

It sounded almost too good to be true.

"You bet."

Ray's little shit-eating grin told me he'd say just about anything to get me on board with the idea of going back out to work even though I was still sporting a fresh c-section scar. I could see the wheels turning in his head as he stroked his long, already greying goatee.

He'd do just about anything to get me back in front of that pervy little camcorder of his, and then, inevitability, lying on my back beneath one rogue stranger after the next "putting my work in" so that we could maintain our comfortable way of life.

It was a cycle I was all too familiar with.

I was, after all, the only girl in Ray's current line-up capable of bringing in the kind of dough he needed to grease the palms and close the deal before it slipped between his greasy fingers just as quickly as it had appeared.

Not that Ray could be blamed for wanting to strike while the iron was hot.

Half-healed c-section scar or not, it was summer, and I was finally a size two again, something I hadn't been in ages. As the living, breathing chattel of Ray by way of a piece of paper called a marriage certificate, it was safe to say he saw it every bit within his rights to do whatever he saw fit with me.

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