I was the daughter of a dirty sheriff and an abused woman. Haedleigh was a small town, which really didn't have much going on, and it was known for its vintage trains. It was the kind of town where everybody knew everybody, your neighbours were practically family and there was only one college in town. Our bars played amateur music from amateur bands who rehearsed in their garages, there was a gas station where trucks would stop for the night and cheap beer cans littered the streets every Saturday and Sunday morning. Haedleigh was the kind of place where kids weren't afraid to play in the streets and more often than not, the elderly would gather every morning, gossiping about whose daughter was spotted with whose son. But even with towns as peaceful as Haedleigh, dirty secrets still lay within the rubble of the scrapyard. The swinging decapitated bodies that hung from the Islesbury Bridge, heads placed on spikes on the front lawn of different homes, and the random gunfire you'd hear in the middle of the night as the people of Haedleigh sat near their radios, in silence. It was all his doing. A man by the name of Salvatore Esposito that people whispered in the confines of their homes with the lights off for fear of the curse that his name carried. Quite honestly, I dismissed the whispers and thought that they were simply rumours. Lord knows how those spread around these parts since people didn't have much to do with their lives, but I suppose I shouldn't have been so naïve. I mean, papa did refer to his corrupt friends as 'the devil'. That should have been warning enough I suppose, but my curiosity would be the death of me...literally. AVAILABLE ON KINDLE!

I lived out of a van and wherever the wheels took me was my home. I danced with drunkards at the local country bar and I smoked cigarettes, staining them with my black cherry lipstick. I always had my head in the clouds, because I was a free spirit; my spirit was pure and I lived one day at a time. I was a lonely poet, constantly seeking for more but failing to put it in the right words. I knew that he was the one for me, from the very moment that I set my eyes on him. He was the kind of man I pictured to take my innocence. His tall and strong build made my small one feel safe around him, as if he were a shield from all the terrible things that the world could throw at me. Those big hands of his, God, I could imagine just the pleasure they could bring to me. The fact that he drank green tea, read the newspaper every dawn, that salt 'n' pepper hair of his, those aged lines on his face- he was like art; to me, he transcended poetry. I wore my emotions on my sleeves and he saw right through me, as he did with every other person. He read me like he did those words on the front page of his newspapers, but I didn't care. I wanted him to be my hero and I wanted to belong to him. I wanted him to take me in his arms and whisk me away, strip me of every bit of innocence even if it ruined me. It's true what they say, 'be careful what you wish for'. I hadn't known that a man like him was no saviour, even though he had warned me, I was in too deep already, too naïve and too in love with what I saw- that I had no idea the ruin that lay ahead as Massimiliano Esposito's woman. Poetry- as it had for all other great poets- led me to my destruction.