frizzyLogic

“You whore, you dirty whore, I’m going to kill you and your mongrel bitch.”

1.50 am and the man next door is outside, shouting, by the front door, underneath my window. Maizy had been barking, probably at a fox in the garden. The man next door does not like it when Maizy barks.

“I’m going to cut your head off, you whore.”

Maizy was now, of course, barking furiously. At him.

He wasn’t thumping on the door, he wasn’t carrying a hammer and the children were not in the house. I opened the bedroom door and Maizy rocketed in, curled up on the bed and was silent. I went straight back to sleep. Sticks and stones, after all, may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

Yeah, right.

My mother first started calling me a whore when I was about 12. It’s a term my step-mother has employed too, although not to my face. “That whore and her half-cast bastard.” Rather like the whore and her mongrel bitch.

As I slip down the sides of the black pit I wonder why I bother to loath myself when others have done it so efficiently, so consistently, for so long. But nobody can loath me better than myself.

Never underestimate the power of words.