Drunken games

It is eight o'clock at night on a hot summer day in 1991.

A father of a family sitting with his friend bangs violently on the table and says loudly ‘Shit! Didn't you hear me? Brat, I said come and say hello to my compadre’.

Knowing that if she doesn't go she will be slapped, she obediently goes over to say hello. The friend spreads his legs and pats her right thigh indicating that she should sit there.

She, in the full bloom of adolescence, resists approaching this man; his smell is repulsive, his appearance repulsive and she notices that his eyes have fixed on the skirt she is wearing.

She knows, in her inexperience, that this man lacks manhood.

What she doesn't know is her father, who, with eight glasses of alcohol, has forgotten that he took a sacred oath to protect this creature.

That child is unimportant, uncaring.

The man takes her by the arm with force to bring her closer, subdues her and places her on his leg. He sits on the urine and oil stains of that wretch.

He brings his face close to hers to press a kiss to the edge of her lip. He laughs as he does so, the devil has entered him and he knows his father won't defend her.

The hand on the back of his neck slowly moves down his back as he tries with his other hand to reach where her legs are. She is searching for her sacred place.

Paralysed as she feels those thick, heavy hands run down her body, she can do nothing but stare in terror at her dad.

Her dad, looking at her and asking for a refill, smiles as he sees how his daughter and her compadre got along.

He finds her legs. He lands his thick hand on her small thighs and slowly runs down her looking for what his wench and his wife denied him at the weekend.

The alcohol in his veins fills him with daring, as it drains his humanity.

He knows, the bastard knows when to strike.

She, in a fraction of a second, understood everything.

She knew she has two daddies, the one who cooks noodle soup and the one who throws it to the vultures.

A tear runs down her cheek.

She uses all her strength to escape; she jumps up and pushes aside the hand of the bastard; she manages to separate herself enough to make a run for it back to her room, the shelter she and her sisters had built against her father's friends.

It's nightfall, it's 2023.

Those girls forgot all those incidents and now they play like their father used to.

If only they knew...

I knew their father and in his last days he told me that he will always regret playing drunken games.