I am the Lord thy God... Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Something happened the summer I was eleven years old. Something bad happened. I can’t say it out loud, but when I close my eyes I can still see the paint, chipped like crushed robin’s eggs, framing the edges of nothing. I hear the key working the bolts into place in the door, smell the dilapidation. Stained plywood walls. Pink-yellow linens. His face. Look what you did. Look what you made me do. The muffled sounds of a struggle. Then infinite silence and a darkness where love cannot go.

Afterward, they took me to Disney World, but I was no longer a child of God.

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