About the Author
Corban Klug holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and is currently in his third and final year of study at the University of Virginia School of Law. He has interned with The Rutherford Institute in Charlotteville, Virginia, a non-profit legal firm devoted to the defense of constitutional rights for religious persons, and after graduation he plans to pursue a legal career in the area of First Amendment constitutional law. He lives with his wife Marcy in Charlottesville.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The snow falls heavily on this wintry night in early December. To my small hands, the bitter wind cuts like a knife, freezing my fingers and numbing my circulation. Huddling deeper into my wool coat and pressing my hands into the small wells of its pockets, I walk on. The empty road before me stretches into the blackened distance, the only light coming from the pale reflection of ambient light off new-fallen snow. The leafless trees that line the road on either side look to me like withered hands reaching up in injured supplication to the cold and uncaring heavens. "Why?" I hear them moan as their naked and twisted boughs move forlornly in the midnight wind. It is a question I cannot answer, though for years I have probed and sought for meaning and hope in my sorrow. Tonight will never happen again, I think with detached determination as I strive to ignore the biting pain of the cold on the soft skin of my cheeks. It has been years and every time he hurt me I told myself that it was the last. That I would never allow him close again. But each time the fear of being alone and the shame of my violation shackled me to the perversely familiar world of pain into which I entered on my thirteenth birthday. This night, however, something was different. The look in his eyes when his hands sought me was strange, less satisfied, more diabolical. And the pain he inflicted was unusually intense and prolonged. When he finished, he stood above me in silent repose and sneered at my nakedness. "You know you’re a filthy wretch, don’t you? A good-for-nothing whore. You are nothing and you’ll always be nothing." And then in the tumultuous wake of his hatred, he turned and left me to my unspoken grief and self-reproach. An hour passed as I lay on my bed, my eyes open but unseeing, my mind alive but my heart not feeling a thing. Finally I capitulated to the inevitable. I have nothing left, I recall thinking as the shame and guilt and helplessness overwhelmed me. The first tears I’d cried in many weeks followed. It was a purging experience. The salty river of grief cleansed a small portion of my heart and clarified reality for me like never before. For more than five years I have been his pawn, the instrument of his pleasure, a toy for his amusement. People wonder why I am cold to those in pain, why my heart is shut off to suffering. They cannot understand because they cannot see that I suffer every moment in tortured silence. I have no time for the pain of others. He has made my world a living nightmare, a place of infinite sorrow and a void of death.
For some reason I did not force these thoughts away as I’d taught myself to do long ago. On this night, I listened to their cries and heard their imploring pleas. Suddenly my travail transmuted to fierce resolve. I knew with certainty that if I didn’t flee now, I never would. So, with a decisiveness that surprised me, I dressed in my warmest clothes, gathered the few dollars I had succeeded in hiding from him and my mother over the passage of time, and opened my window onto the frigid night. Climbing out onto the roof of my home, I took care to make no sound. If he found out that I was trying to escape he would punish me severely. My shoes made only mild scratching sounds on the frozen shingles as I crossed the length of the roof and climbed onto the limb of the oak tree that I had loved since my earliest days. It was the only thing I knew I would miss about my past. There was nothing else. Staying to the shadows I traversed my lawn and moved out into the silence of the lane. I did not look back. That was one hour ago.
Now, walking along this lonely road against the lancing pressure of the winter wind, my nose and feet numb from the cold, I struggle to summon purpose from my broken soul. The voices of despair and defeat sound in my ears, importuning upon me to surrender my newfound freedom and return to the forced comfort of my world of hurt. But something unknown and potent drives me onward. Long ago I lost faith in hope. In my father’s sickening embrace, I lost faith in everything good. The world is diseased and my case is terminal. I still believe that, but at least in independence I can put up a better fight against the inevitable. I only have a faint glimmer of an idea of where I am going, and even that is a last resort. Eight miles beyond town, my aunt lives. She is a cruel woman, bitter and worn by unfriendly years, but at least she is a woman. She might offer me an anonymous place of rest for the night. After that, though, I don’t know. But my days of living in muted horror and suffering untold humiliation and pain are over. I cannot return, for to return is to die. I have little of value left in me, but I will not choose to concede my very life to the flames without putting up a fight.
