Incipient

[The following prose was written using a collection of ridiculous words provided to me on facebook. They appear in the order by which I received them, beginning with the title of this piece.]

Everyone has a beginning. Most lives start with the chaos of birth, the kicking and screaming of both mother and child, all sickeningly ignored once a cry is produced. That wail an adrenalin shot to the soul, awakening the maternal instinct. A necessary cappuccino for that naïve wench as she begins her first shift. Creation, a forgotten horror, lost in a hormonal haze of cooing and suckling. But I wasn't created there. I slid out of my mother's chlamydia riddled cunt into a life of begrudging acceptance. My childhood a conga line of meagre meals, neglect, belittling, fear - and ultimately poverty.

My mother was a crack-addicted cliché. She would slip a bottle into my mouth as a pipe slipped into hers. In her cloud of addiction she could barely see me. It was only in between hits she managed to differentiate me from the upholstery that engulfed my delicate form. In some sort of sick cosmic joke however, I survived the initial pandemonium. I can't remember growing up, but it happened fairly quickly. I remember having to clean vomit off my mother's face before I knew how to tie my shoe laces. I evolved, I grew able to deal with her capricious fits. Her crying, her declarations of love. Her screaming, her acrid hisses of loathing. I was her punching bag, taking hits from the rage and depression that came with her comedowns. I was her carer, there to watch her while she flew transcendent, her mind riding the cloud each puff of her pipe produced. I always made sure she landed safely, guiding her back to reality gently. I was too afraid of what I'd do without her to notice how cancerous she was. She was human aids, attacking the immune system of my life. Any bit of sadness I felt outside the walls of our rented hell floored me. I was far too crippled to withstand further third-party beatings.

So I became angry instead. As I grew I stopped being the timid child from that broken home and I started to break children. At home I was a runt, a forgotten mongrel cast to the shadows - the ill-favored brother to a fix born decades before. One off-spring of my mother's frivolity enslaved her, the other she enslaved. But on the days I was allowed to leave her, by orders from the council, I could be any one I wanted, do anything I wanted. Her darkness could no longer breed with me. But it had laid eggs within me; I wanted to hurt.

My performance deserves a toast, I was a convincing villain, frightful even - the role of terrorizer was one I played impeccably. Twisted serendipity meant I'd seen my fair share of terrifying people. Men who beat my mother against walls, bouncing her like a yo-yo from their fists to the brick. Men demanding money we could not give, using their chocking grip on me as a bartering chip as she frantically fished coins from her purse, jewellery from the cupboard, her stash from my room. She always told them not to touch 'the boy' - it made me wonder if she remembered my name. Or if perhaps my latest attempt at giving myself a haircut had made me unrecognizable to her constantly fluctuating lucidity.

She called me Asher to mean happiness - an ironic stab at the religion she abandoned when she ran away from home. She branded me with her rebellion, tarred me with the brush of it so that the only real blessing I ever received was on the day she died. Her organs stagnated within her. She didn't even feel it coming, so unaware of anything beyond her own mind. The air she breathed was always so toxic, a mixture of drugs, smoke, farts and sweat. We shared the air, but the production was all her. She lived in a midden of her own making. If it wasn't for me no one would ever have known she had died. The smell of her rotting corpse would have made no difference to the repugnant burn of the building we lived in. No one would have come looking for her. She would have just, stopped.

I noticed of course, when her lungs ceased and her pupils blew. I noticed. I screamed as loudly as I could, repetitively for hours, trying to wake a neighbour to come find us. No one came, and we didn't have a phone. I was forced to abandon her where she lay. Her eyes fixed, paralyzed in a bulging shock. Her hand coiled around the child she treasured above me - the pipe lived for longer than she, burning beyond the time I turned my back on them both and left the flat.

That was the day I was born, from the crusted excrement of someone else's not-quite existence. The eleven years prior; a prenatal incipience.

I pretend to others that my mother died in a car accident. She had dropped me at cello practice and she was just going to go pick me up a treat for afterwards when a lorry slammed into the side of her at a busy junction. I've told the story so many times, for so many years, that I almost forget the reality. In the engaging sonder I experience away from her I forget our abysmal existence, shocked instead by the diversity of life. But my mother's lies have not left me, they seep into my dreams at night; 'I don't do that much', 'I can quit any time', 'It's not my fault', 'I fed you already', 'I'll get help tomorrow', 'I'll come home tonight', 'I won't let him hurt you', 'I won't let anyone hurt you', 'If you don't help I'm going to kill myself', 'I love you'. They swim through my mind like ghosts that she left, hatchlings of the darkness that raped my psyche for the decade before I was born. A frustrated onism convulsing through me, fed by a crippling fear of my own DNA.

The ghosts are so often there I'm beginning to wonder if they're really my own. Children of my own darkness, not hers. I just want to make them go away. To confuse them, just for a while so I can clear my head. Maybe i'll give them something to make them leave, to make them stop. Just a little bit. Just once.