My Dear Cousin - My Novel

  

                                                          16^th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

In my previous letters I covered the falling out between my family, and I and my refusal to attend my sister’s wedding. I believe the next point to be noted is an incident between Uncle Allen and I.

 

For all my life I wanted to be a writer and, well, the major obstacle in that department happens to be nerve damage I received, most likely, at the hands of (Pickle) and (Pony Girl). They had a game when we were children where they would pull me off the couch and make my head hit the floor.

 

This happened over and over and over again until I started having headaches and such. Well, mom couldn’t afford a sitter and it wasn’t like my old man wanted to look after his children. This left me with difficulty reading and interpreting letters.

 

Around two thousand and nine I wrote a novel about a society fighting off an alien invasion on a world neither of them belonged to. Allen volunteered to read it for me and help with editing but, well, for one his feedback was full of insults, and for another he had trouble understanding that I have nerve damage.

 

Part of me wants to believe that old Allen was a fool, part of me thinks that he was intentionally sabotaging my writing so that I would need to spend the rest of my life dealing with my mentally ill brother. Allen said he had just been joking, but I don’t know. Insults tend to be malicious.

 

I guess it doesn’t matter. I didn’t get help with my novel, and I was plenty angry at Uncle Allen, but that’s water under the bridge now. Family was never of any use to me before, and it was still rather useless.

 

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

My Dear Cousin - My Legal Guardian

4^th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

At this point a tangent may be in order. I don’t believe I mentioned that my legal guardian and the executor of my mother’s estate was the old man’s sister. Yes, my aunt on my (Yule)’s side became my guardian after my mother’s passing. The old man was busy with his new wife and mom didn’t trust him.

I’m not sure why he was in charge of the upkeep of my home, but you see my aunt did the work. We ripped out the carpet ourselves, and my aunt and her husband put in the acrylic tile. When the wood under it rotted, and the tile came up she hired her nephew from another aunt to put it back together. When the wood rotted again they finally got a professional to do the work. After the third rotting they gave up.

From what I gather I could have had a lot more work done for what I paid for the floors, light fixtures, and a few plugs. My aunt, with the old man’s permission, overpaid herself. I’m only bitter about this because I live in so much of a slum and still haven’t gotten my home repaired.

My aunt was poor and needed money. We have all done things we’re not proud of for money. I get it, she handled things for me that my old man was too much of a child to deal with. She deserved something for that, but she also deserved to be in prison for child neglect. Even had she not been my legal guardian it is now state law that she needed to report the old man for leaving a ten year old alone.

If you ask at this point why the old man, who at least saw what the house looked like on weekends when he came over to take me to the store, didn’t do anything about the state of things, I have an answer. He didn’t really care.

I once called him and said we needed a plumber, because the tap was leaking in the bathroom. He just said “No we don’t, let it leak.” That weekend he called me into the bathroom and said “you forgot to turn the sink off.” I told him to try turning it off, and he finally called his sister who sent her husband to fix the problem.

My old man was like that. He would live with broken things. Oddly, he would also go to the store and fill up two carts worth of things that would then wind up on the floor. He would never take any of it back home with him on Monday when he left to go be with his wife. That is unless his wife came with him to my home. In which case she would walk off with whatever she could get her hands on.

Evil stepmoms, am I right,

 

 

Richard Leland Neal