Dear God, please have mercy on Uncle Kenny
Mommy says he has cancer of the soul. Cancer is what killed granddad and Genny’s mum and our dog Loser. Cancer is a bad thing in the world. Mommy said Uncle Kenny is going to hell because he got the cancer but I want to know if you can help him find his way to heaven. He was always nice to me and plays with me and my dolls all call him daddy even though he is just Uncle Kenny. Uncle Kenny told me lots of things which no one ever talks about so I could understand them better. Uncle Kenny was an honest man and mommy says he is a lying bastard so I don’t know. Do you know? Could you tell me, if you aren’t too busy?
Uncle Kenny once told me that he and mummy were both hurting from the same wound, but that it hurt them both in different ways. He said that for mummy it was just a burning hole but for him it was a feeling of space, like a cut out square. I told him that I had a square hole in my heart and that’s why the doctors sometimes have to take me to lie in the hospital bed for a few weeks. He said it was like that but my hole was something missing whereas his hole had become a part of him. I told him I understood him because when I was looking at his eyes and talking to him then I felt I did understand, but now that I’m writing to you I’m not so sure anymore. How can a hole be a part of someone? Did something bad happen to mommy and Uncle Kenny? Is that why they never spoke to granddad anymore? Grandma died when she was young because people with Down syndrome can’t live as long as other people, so granddad was the one who took care of them both. But granddad could be mean sometimes. My mommy told me to never be alone with him. But then mommy said I could never be alone with Uncle Kenny either.
Mommy says I can never see Uncle Kenny again and when she had her special drink she threw the empty glass at the wall and it broke everywhere and baby Sam woke up crying and mommy said I had to pick out the sharps from his cot. I got a cut on my finger and mommy said I was a idiot for putting my blood on Sam’s bed clothes and that it would look bad when the woman with the briefcase came around. The woman comes around every couple of months and mommy doesn’t let her in unless she has an appointment so she can clean up the house. Mommy always gets angry at the woman with the briefcase and she always asks me if I like living with Mommy and mommy says if I ever lie and say no then they will take me away from her forever and I’ll have to live far away from everything and everyone. But I feel like I already do live faraway sometimes. Uncle Kenny told me I could go far away just by closing my eyes. I do it a lot now.
Maybe if I close my eyes and go far away like Uncle Kenny said I could meet him sometimes in heaven. But if he goes to hell like mommy says I don’t want to go there. It’s so hot in hell it feels like cold. Mommy says everyone who ever did anything bad is down there waiting to do bad things to me, that’s why I have to be good and to forget any bad things I’ve seen. Please God, don’t let Uncle Kenny go down to hell. Please find a place for him in heaven and may he rest his soul forever. Amen.
JustificWTFn
Yea yea I know, what the fuck is this? I dunno but I like it. I found it. I have NO memory of writing this, but it was available as a thing on my Patreon and I guess since this is all I ever put up, that’s why nobody ever paidtreoned me, ah well. My own fault. Still, I think this little piece is quite interesting, and a bit of a departure from my usual stuff. It’s obviously written from the eyes of a child – I think I just wanted an excuse to use the words “cancer of the soul” which has long been a phrase I spit out at people during drunken park bench rants, usually when discussing politicians. So looking at the doc file’s meta, I can see that the content of this was created 2014/03/26 13.05. In my life, at the time, I think my own kid was about 2 then. For whatever reason I decided to write from a Child’s POV a letter to god about Uncle Kenny who mommy says has cancer of the soul. I think the idea was that the author of the letter liked Uncle Kenny but his mum didn’t. Maybe Uncle Kenny wasn’t a blood uncle but just someone the mum was shagging, or maybe he was a blood uncle and it was about sibling rivalry. I get on great with my sisters so I do not know what inspired this little letter.
TL;DR it’s a snippet window into very dysfunctional family from the eyes of a child.
Well, actually, I’m going to go a little further here and explain in a bit more detail the fact that actually my parents were foster carers, so I grew up with children sharing my house and my family who had seen all kinds of shit. For instance, the mother with Down syndrome was a case that we had in one of our foster carers. So that’s directly drawn from life, though I won’t go into the details. And yeah, I was certainly hinting at darker things, but I don’t want to go into it any deeper. I mean, these tragedies are not ones I experienced personally, but certainly lived close to people who had and sometimes their tragedies washed into the lives of my own family. We certainly had our own dramas as a result of it, which again I won’t be going into right now, but they did involve my sisters at times and myself, of course. So yeah, this is quite a personal piece, but it’s more of an autobiographical one perhaps than I initially realised. And as I say, I have no memory of writing it and it is different in tone from all my other stuff. So I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks.
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originally published on patreon and then on stephenprime.com and now etched permanently in the short-term memory of a yet amazing group of readers.
When you post a piece about a mother of two who's an alcoholic, has temper issues and subject to childcare inspector visits and then explain that it's an autobiographical piece (ok, word "perhaps" was used to be fair but still) it invokes a confusing feeling of wanting to console you.