I'm not ( I think, anwayay), a role-playing nerd. Before the role-playing nerds get offended, lemee clarify that I do roleplay with out of town friends about once a month, that I spent way too much of my youth in roleplaying games, and I spent about ten years playing the text-based rpg Dragonrealms before i just sort of fell out of it.

That's neither here not there, I guess, my original poitn was supopsed to have been that when I do roleplay once a month or so, it's more like the story play you've described and less rules and dice-rolling. Lately I've been into more sort of modern era stuff than historical or future or fantasy, but I'll give the site a peep. With the caveat that I can get frightfully bored with even the most entertaining stuff pretty quickly.

See you there.

I lied awake, hidden under the blankets, my head stuffed between the pillows to drown out the noise. I thought he was gone. Three days, we hadn’t seen him. I wasn’t surprised, we couldn’t have been so fortunate as to have lost him for good.  And now they were at it again, I didn’t really get my hopes up anymore.

In the old house, when they would fight, my sisters and I would migrate to my bedroom and stay there. We were safer when we stayed together, it wasn’t so easy for him to get one of us alone. In the new house, my sister’s room was on the opposite end of the house. Through the living room. Where they were.

I heard my mother’s bedroom door slam, I heard the shoving, the cursing, the crying. I heard the door open again, running back into the living room. Why won’t he leave? Why wouldn’t he just die somewhere? If I wasn’t ten years old, I could kill him myself and we would be safe. Did she call the police again? Why did they always take so long?

‘Steve!’ I heard my mother cry. It was the call I’d been dreading. Always, I was dragged into this. Didn’t she know I was terrified of him? Did she know he beat me more than he beat her, harder than he beat her? I’m powerless, why do I always have to stand between them?

I got out of bed, trembling not from the bitter January air in a house with one gas heater.

The tree limbs outside of my door scratched the windows in the wind, we’re coming to get you, too. I shuffled out of the door slowly, nearly petrified, but after six years I no longer felt a beating, not on the inside.

‘Call the police!’ My mother told me. She hadn’t called the police. I’m was ten, and I knew how to call the police, I knew what to say. I knew ‘breaking and entering’ I knew ‘domestic dispute’.

The window was broken. How did I not hear that? The front door was unlocked, still open, the window next to it shattered from the outside.  Ernesto sat in the middle of our living floor-ours-not his- in the leather jacket we bought him for Christmas. ‘We love you, daddy.’, we wrote on the package. Please, believe us. Whatever it takes. We will call you daddy, we will skip our own gifts to afford yours. We will say we love you.

‘Your momma, why she do this to me? Look what she make me do.’ Then he showed me the knife. Bloodstained, his own, I was quickly assured, as he held up his  gashed and bleeding hand. ‘Why she fight with me? She say she don’t love me no more. Why she lie, what I’m supposed to do?’.  He continued carving something indecipherable into our floors in our new house. Ours-not his.

Don’t worry, little man. It will take her another two years to leave you. She will continue to turn a blind eye, working nights while you stay home to beat us and molest us. You’ll continue to tell us you’ll kill us if she leaves you, if she finds out what you do. We thinks she knows. She will call Sarah a liar when Sarah tells her, a few months later she will pack up everything, send five kids in five different directions, and disappear for two years.

But you’ll never leave us, will you? You will be here, and we’ll remember you and what you taught us, always.

Ernesto now lives in a ratty, dilapidated inn in Port Arthur, Texas. He trades rent for labor and maintenance around the place. My sisters (two of them his daughters) say he is living in a little hell of his own. I had to respectfully disagree, adding that he is alive at all is more an example of God’s grace than he deserves and submit that there is no hell deep enough for a child molester.