Brigit's Flame, May wk 2, "Necessary Evil" prompt, 400 words, advanced entry, adult

[riotheclown]

Fists Full of Nothing

 

 

On the day I was born I was entrusted with a conscience.

 My father a pedophile, my mother a drunk, my sister a junkie and my brother a suicidal maniac all managed to hide from the world what went on in that house. I was the problem. That’s what they said. That was the official story for the school, for the social worker, for the police. I guess I was. I was a like mongoose in a snake pit. 

“The last thing we needed was another kid.” was how my mother put it but she meant the last thing she wanted was me. I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking that I’m one of those people who blames everything on his childhood or that I am trying to justify my crimes with having been abused as a kid. I’m not. I am here because of my own actions. I know that. I took a life and so now my life is forfeit. What is wrong is wrong. What’s right is right.

 But it doesn’t mean that I can’t look back at that bawling baby that I was and wonder how I could have fought so hard right from the start with no one who loved me or who cared. That is the hardest thing. How I fought and how, for a while at least, I was right to fight. 

 I grew up and I got away but I could not stop fighting. I never wanted anything because I never could hold on to anything but I wanted someone to love me. How could anyone love me when I could never trust anyone? How could I hold on to anything when my hands where always held tight in fists? I got sent to prison for fighting but I am going to die by lethal injection because I killed a man, a bad man who had no conscience, a snake. 

 There are a lot of things I know for sure. I know that all babies that are born should be wanted and loved. I know I should have spent my life just saying that and nothing else. I know I wasted my life and now I am going to die.

 On the day I was born I was entrusted with a conscience.