Aunt Cindy's Bizarre World

My dad had been born to a single teenage mother who placed him in an orphanage run by a Pentecostal church. He had been raised since he had been just a baby to be a holy roller. My mothers' parents had both been killed in a car crash when they hit a patch of black ice one early morning in Connecticut when I was only seven. That left me with only one living blood relative other than my mother and father. My mothers' younger sister who lived in New York City and was named Cindy.

My parents never even mentioned her in front of me. I only knew she existed at all because our house had thin walls and when her name would come up my father would always raise his voice in anger. I would overhear words like, harlot; abomination, pervert, sick and every vile name he could think of for her and not use swear words. Whenever she was being discussed in the next room by my mother and father I would take a drinking glass and out it against the wall to listen in.

I would hear my father saying she was no more than a common prostitute leading men to damnation. Even viler than a normal lesbian because of the abomination to the lord she had taken as a lover. One evening I overheard him saying that she was not only a model for vile pornographic magazines but also that they were of the sickest and most anti God publications on earth. He said that when she would die there would be a special place of torment for her in Hell.

By the time I was just eleven years old I found myself taking ice cold showers several times a day. I was having almost constant erections and I had the urge to masturbate. I had been indoctrinated enough by my father to really believe it was a wretched sin in the eyes of the lord. More than that however I knew that if I was caught I would be skinned alive.

It was one week before my thirteenth birthday that my life would be forever changed. I awoke in the middle of the night to the acrid stench of smoke. I found myself choking and gagging on thick smoke and did the only thing I could to survive. I wrapped myself in a blanket and ran right through my bedroom window. My fear of the fire and burning to death was far greater than my fear of throwing myself out of a second story window. I have no memory of hitting the ground.