My name is Kenya Mack. I’m nineteen years old, a Private in the United States Army. At 2:00 in the morning, in the suffocating Texas summer air, I wasn’t attacked on some distant battlefield, but right inside my own childhood bedroom. My stepbrother, Dylan, kicked the door open, his face twisted with alcohol and hatred. A Philips head screwdriver clutched in his hand. The thrust missed my face but found my shoulder, a sickening crack echoing as it went through my right clavicle, pinning me to the wall. The pain ripped a scream from my throat.
But the worst was yet to come.
When my father, Thomas, and my stepmother, Evelyn, appeared, I begged them with my eyes, but they just stood there. And then my stepmother’s voice, sickly sweet, said, “Oh, now Kenya, don’t be so dramatic.” My father just sighed. “Her brother’s drunk. She always did love the attention.” They laughed, completely unaware that through the agony, I had managed to send a three-letter signal. A signal that would burn their fabricated world to ash.
If family is supposed to be your safest harbor, but instead is the source of your deepest pain, then know that you are not alone.
The first sign of the devil is his breath.
