Because it was to show reverence

Because I had acted like a slave and he had taken up the role of being a master

Because how else could he feel bigger than me

Because I made myself in his image; insecure, jealous and merciful

Because he loved me

Because He loved me

Or so they said

I wish I was better at walking around and pretending. I wish I could lie with a straight face like you do. I wish I could inhale other people's life force and exhale misery like you. I wish I could build my life on the edge of the ashes of everything I had burned down. I wish the corpses in my closet were quiet like yours. I was so envious of how much you were allowed not to care while I was afflicted with the opposite disease.

Fuck.

You.

I mean it, fuck you. Fuck your lies, your shitty face, your shitty writing, your shitty shallow existence. Fuck you for hurting me. Fuck you for the abuse, the emotional cruelty, the sexual manipulation, the abortion I didn't want to have but why the fuck would I want you to be a father, I might as well have birthed half a monster. Fuck your sentiment. Fuck your future, fuck your ambition, fuck anyone and everyone who will meet you and know you, you ticking time bomb, you radiation emitting sore on the face of decency, you insensitive arrogant selfish prick. I want to exact violence on you, I want to cut off your dick and shove it in your mouth I want to kill everyone close to you so that you know how it feels to have no one. I want to scar you permanently. I want you to know that one day your wife will leave you because staying will kill her. I want your kids to realise that their father has a hole in him the size of India that is at best filled with parasites. I want you to know that my suicide was sponsored by you. I want you to know that I was angry and resentful and bitter and mad as hell until the very end. There is no poetry in you. No life, no viability of it. You are ugly, unkind, unforgiving and undeserving of any kind of happiness. You are the opposite of all that is good and honest. You are sick. Sick in your head and heart and if there is a God then he will be your downfall and if there is a devil, he is in your bloodstream and if there is hope, it jumped ship a long, long, time ago.

When you have a mental illness, and you tell someone, the first thing people think is that you're lying. The second thing they think is that you must not have 'real' problems so you thought yourself into one. They don't understand statements like 'I want to die' and they think that you exaggerate and make problems out of nothing. I have bipolar disorder. It's hard and stressful and it makes me doubt myself constantly. My own family doesn't understand it. I try, for my own sake, to keep it hidden and pretend that i'm okay but i'm just so angry. I'm angry that no one told me as a kid that it was possible to have a mental illness without being called crazy. No one told me that mental disorders could kill you just as easily as any other physical illness could. People make it hard and it shouldn't be. It really really, shouldn't be. 

Chapter One

This is not a happy story. Fair warning dear reader, this story does not end well. If there are times in this story when you think I am changing my mind and you become hopeful for a better story, I urge you to turn on the news, or listen to a sad song. It’ll put you right back where you need to be if you’re going to continue reading.

Another thing; if you have not experienced gut wrenching pain, where you’d rather take a knife to your wrists or a noose to your neck or even bleach to your insides, this story will seem a little exaggerated in its sadness. To those readers, I say, first this is a journey you might not want to consider too fast. I’m a firm believer that everything you come into contact with affects your purity and so this may give you awful ideas where it is not intended to. In any case, I’m sorry; for those who know these kinds of stories all too well, and to those who are affected by them anyways.

It all began with Lucy’s birth. No wait, perhaps that’s a bit too far in to tell you. Maybe I’ll start like this; it all began with the attempted abortions. Alice sat crouching over the edge of her bed time and time again trying everything, from coat hanger to unnatural squeezing around her midsection to premature promises to Satan (the idea of God had long ago vanished after this one would not go away as easily as the others). Alice tried harder at this than she had anything in her life but the child persisted, and so Alice‘s lifestyle persisted. Spurning this troublesome pregnancy Alice drank all she wanted and snorted all she could get her hands on. She was wilder than usual with the lingering excuse that she was going to clean up her act once the fixated thing slid out of her.

On the day of, Alice felt the first pangs and decided that she was going to take it out before it hit the ground. Armed with a fifth of vodka she drank the pain away and waited to feel the crowning but maybe the kid learned something because Alice remained dilated at four centimetres for the better part of ten hours until it was unbearable and she had to call an ambulance and was carted off to hospital. If the state of her, sickened the doctor, he made clear not to show it and immediately informed her she would have to endure a caesarean. Drunk on vodka, misery and the enduring testament that God does love to protect little children, Alice agreed and off to surgery she was carted. A few hours later when her mother came to see her Alice insisted she was going to take care of it.

Thus began Lucy’s introduction to sadness. Contrary to her pre-birth behaviour the bravery that Lucy had displayed at defying her mother’s forceful attempts to get rid of her would never again reoccur for the duration of her life. From then on, Lucy was to spend the rest of her days overwhelmed by a crippling, sometimes unknown sometimes not, fear.

Lucy survived the first few years of her life the same way a certain man I know survived through his schooling, barely and with so much luck it almost seemed like cheating. Her first one and a half years was seen through by relatives, Jesus Christ himself and stray cats that wandered in whenever her mother went out. After Lucy could walk and talk a little, the relatives felt discharged of their duty and the cheap flat became quiet, occupied by unwilling Lucy and unwilling Alice. Every morning her mother would leave for a day of mediocre work and enthusiastic philandering. She would feed Lucy before she left and if she was still in the right frame of mind when she got back the malnourished child would get more. But children have particularly strong constitutions especially in the most adverse of circumstances. This is not to say that Lucy had the best of health but she certainly was doing much better than she should have been.

There is a theory that states that the universe is all about energy and every bit of energy radiated by people to and at each other will affect them in some way. Her mother’s promiscuity was to affect Lucy later in her life to a degree that it was nothing less than crippling. On this note perhaps, it may be prudent to say that Alice was not necessarily a terrible person; she’d just left decision making to the whims of her desires and believed so strongly in her own helplessness that she’d truly become unable to control herself. The hardships of life are unimaginable and Alice had been subjected to perhaps one of the worst; never believing she was good enough. Settling for average, she hit far below the target and spiralled fast out of control. She believed in love but the men she met equated love with sex and so she believed in sex and in a roundabout way, she’d become so great at living a terrible lifestyle that the thought of getting better made her ill on the inside. She hated herself so much for being a terrible mother that she began to hate her child for making her a mother. And thus began the beatings.

Now anyone who has ever gotten angry and lashed out at another person can tell you that it is both the most exhilarating and terrible thing to get a reaction from them. After the first few, disciplinary of course (or so Alice assured herself), Alice found that inflicting pain gave her a form of power she'd never experienced before. It was power she didn’t have to work for and it felt good to be able to lord over someone else for a change. Her cruelty became unlimited, everything from burning the child to whipping to verbal abuse. It was then, I am sorry to say, that Alice sealed her karmic fate. Everything about her up to that point had seemed pitiable, but the cruelty was malice incarnate and could no longer go unnoticed, or unpunished.

The gods sometimes choose to remain woefully ignorant of the goings on, on Earth. The dictates of free will are somewhat binding on them and quite frankly, man turned to evil like a child turned to stealing sugar when it knew it was wrong and they resorted to watching and intervening through the power they instilled in the energy of the earth which most people commonly refer to as karma. This principle meant that as the good was rewarded the bad was punished, but time passes slow in the realm of the gods, outside the reaches of knowledge and existence. Fortunately for our story and unfortunately for one of our main characters (whose life ends shortly), karma was acting like a factory expecting an inspection.

On a day much like one you have experienced today, Alice went further than she should have. After a particularly terrible round of beatings, little Lucy was left limp on the floor. Ignorant to her mother’s pleading that she wake up it seemed the child was dying and if you, like myself, has tried to hide a corpse you will know that not only is it difficult to hide it but it is also difficult to feign amnesia as regards the existence of said corpse to the outside world. And so there was no choice but to go to hospital. The doctors immediately attended to the now three year old Lucy while the authorities questioned her mother. Alice and I are both wonderful actresses and so she escaped punishment (like I escaped paying for a taxi cab through a woeful story of injured animals and the assassination of JFK). When Lucy was well enough to return home, her mother bundled her up like the caregiver she was not and set off down the street to their apartment block hand in hand. It was the fondest memory Lucy had of her mother, and unironically, the last. In attempting to cross a busy intersection, Alice’s body, moving at less than one kilometre per hour collided with a motorbike moving at eighty kilometres per hour. Lucy was thrown alongside her mother’s body but the landing was softened by Alice’s torso which was at this point, semi-detached from the head. The scene was worse than ugly. It was the stuff of Hitchcockian fantasy and Tarantinic dreams. It was awful for poor Lucy, who could never get the image out of her mind until the day she died. After all was said and established, Lucy’s relatives refused to take her in citing religious nonsense and superstitious bile. And so Lucy was placed in a car with her few worldly belongings and sent off to a place located a ways away from the town, a building of imposing stature and a grim aura with large iron wrought gates at the forefront of which was embossed the words ‘MUSQORN COUNTY ORPHANAGE.’ 

Title: Lucy Love

Genre : YA

Word Count: (current submission is 1524 words long.)

Author's name : Mitchel Ondili

Why my project is a good fit: It fills a gap in the hearts of every lonely book lover. It' a book that doesn't beg to be understood, it lays out its story and you laugh and cry and groan your sympathy and love Lucy.

Synopsis: a young girl, is born in unfortunate circumstances and spends the rest of her life trying to find the place she fits perfectly into. On the way she finds and loses hope, finds and loses friends, finds and loses herself.

Target audience : 11-26 years

My bio: I'm a 20 year old law school student living in Nairobi, Kenya and I love to write, to read and to be influenced by the ever expanding world of writers and poets around me. 

The black dog was the family pet.

Big and boundless, each of us never failed to find its fur caught in our clothing, at times making its way into our noses, clogging, choking, taking days of discomfort to dislodge.

Having agreed to put it on a diet, we each continued to feed it under the table. And so bigger it grew, and no person was absolved from the blame. It was mom and dad’s first pet together. She, with her cold cuts of revenge and bitterness fed it the most when dad was at work, too distracted to remember until it came home. At birth, I was introduced to it, even in the hospital room, its presence made me cry longer than the average child. We were a ragtag bunch of three, cutting scraps of ourselves to feed the family pet.

The black dog seemed omnipresent, he could be with all of us at once. Nose pushing into our hands, eyes asking for his pound of flesh. We never gave him a name or a leash, or rules. And so, badly behaved, he made his way to my school, to dad’s work and was never late for lunch with mom back home. I began to hate him, how big he was, how loud he would bark at the table making us all drown in silence. But I needed his comfort, without him to sleep with at night, I was empty. Better the thoughts he provided me than the nothingness without them.

The black dog reached its peak after the death of dad’s mom. The sight of its fur, the sound of its bark made me sick. I spend days in dread waiting to hear the crack of a firearm, and to find the black dog licking delightedly at dad’s remains. After three months, by which the black dog was then obese, dad gave it a name. Its demeanour shifted completely, its fur stood on edge, its ears and mouth pulled back to expose a snarl. It growled at dad. He began taking medicine to stave it off. The medicine made it so that my dad didn’t feel compelled to feed it. Starved of attention from him it rounded on my mother and me.

Late one evening, I received a sandwich from my mother, the black dog contentedly bounding up to me. She had had hers first, and she fell before I could finish it. I had barely enough time to phone for help.

It’s been three months since I saw our family pet, six years since mom poisoned herself. Just this morning I got myself a kitten from the shelter. With its mangled eye and ratted fur, it seemed to have met both real and metaphorical black dogs in its time. It would need a lot of loving, but knowing the journey, providing that care suited me just fine.

The logistics of running away as a minor are too many and too complex to pull of successfully. At the train station I stared up at the schedule wondering if I had enough to go as far as my bruised legs could carry me. Wondering if I had enough time, money, strength. Already I had begun to reconsider whether the latest beating really was the straw that had broken my back, certainly my father's belt had seemed determined to. The aches and the slow burning sensation over my body was not new to me, I remembered that the bruises only hurt when I touched them, or moved, or sat down. She was much older than me, reading The Goldfinch. I stare at her, she looks up, makes eye contact, makes her way to me and sits. She doesn't ask if I'm alright. I think we both sense that it's a stupid question. She takes out from a bag a sandwich and hands it to me. I eat it without thanking her. She does not seem to want thanks. She feels both intensely caring and aloof at the same time. Round brown eyes framed by a cloud of brown hair lined with silver. A soft mouth and sharply angled nose, her features seem to be at war with each other.In my mind, I have already decided to head back to my hellhole. As if sensing my resignation, she sighs for us both, turns to me and says "Keep your head up, you've got it," stands and walks away. Her words remain with me. A year later, I leave. 

It began somewhere between 9/11 and Aleppo. As I write this, I struggle to keep the tears from falling on my book, the knowledge is precious. The first waves of the inhuman were put in suits and commanded to act in the middle of warzones, eliminating the women and children, the sick and wounded and elderly. And then they grew out of control. When a CNN journalist was attacked on live television and eaten, many blamed drugs. Others blamed the psychological effect of the war. They wrote papers about it failing to realise what truly was happening. There were jokes about bath salts, conferences about PTSD. But the virus remained unnamed, undiagnosed. The first I heard of it was when I was in school. People whispering excitedly about having to fight for their lives. I thought they were dumb. But here I am; crouched in the corner of a sub basement of a building in the middle of the end of the world. The others are long gone. My scavenge for food is a scavenge for survival, for hope, for a warm body to cling to. I am better off on my own, I can mask my scent far easier but I am for want of humanity. I long to meet a being without the desire to kill and destroy. I am weary of living on adrenalin alone.This is M.N.H and if you find this, run.

I worry for myself

Every move on my part is accompanied with a wild sense of fear that this is not who I really am

That this is who I have been provoked to be

A lawyer, because it would make my father proud

Timid, because that's what the beatings were for

Cruel because I learned at my mother's tongue

The sly underpinnings of my childhood linger in my blood and I can only discern so much of what the effect is

I fear that one day I will look into the mirror and see an amalgamation of my parents choices, my sibling's character, my career's influence, my own family's imprint

That amongst all the others I will have no true idea of who I am

It feels as though the very air sways my mind and my decisionsFor if, controlled all its life, how will the puppet know what life is like otherwise?

Mommy's eyes shine like the glass on the car when its raining steady

Daddy says it's not time yet

I'm on the couch, eyes alternating between the red and avoiding puppy's little body twisted all wrong on the carpet

Daddy's tells me to move, my dress is dripping and something...evadence he calls it

I stare down at little girl's body, she's prettier than I am

But she's dead now and that makes me smile

I make eye contact with daddy and mommy and we all grin

The big fancy marble house is all ready

The other daddy with his eyes ripped out (I shoved one in my pocket, don't tell mommy)

The other mommy with herself all inside out

Daddy hands me the knife and fork

I put my hands together and pray for the food all nice like mommy taught me

I think I'll start with puppy

Boy am I hungry!