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 - From Carpet to Concrete

3^rd May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

As you’ve read in my last few letters my life was rather hard up until my mother’s passing. When my mom was well I had a mother most of the time and a father one day a week. When she got sick I had a father from Friday night to Monday morning. When mom died my music lessons stopped because they took place during the week and the old man didn’t want to make the drive. Therapy for my nerve damage also stopped.

There I was, a ten year old living in a house with a fourteen year old mental case as the closest thing I had to a guardian. I have to ask why no one on my street said anything about this.  How do people just turn away from so much in this world? How do we make ourselves blind? Three children, two boys, one girl, fourteen, twelve, and ten, who had just lost their mother and were living alone.

To add injury to injury, it took my old man about six months to turn my house into a slum. He made no attempt to keep up the garden, and he ripped out the carpets. They did replace a few old electrical fittings with new ones that made the house safer and we got fire extinguishers. However, the old man replaced my carpets with acrylic tile which was laid over the old wood floors. The wood rotted and the floors came up. I was walking on concrete before long.

This was the time that (Pickle) got used to using me as the scapegoat. I would complain about him breaking my toys or using my toothbrush for something abnormal. I once went a week without brushing my teeth because he got petroleum jelly all over the brush and I had to wait for the old man to come home to take me shopping.

Every day he would say “I’m under so much stress, Ricky says you did this to me two years ago.” About once or twice a week this would culminate into a beating from (Pickle). He was four years older than me and the old man got him thousands of dollars in weight equipment.

I’m still bitter about the fact that I had five thousand dollars of weights in one room and nothing to cover the foundation of the house in the other. Between the ages of ten and fourteen I figured out that I was white trash, what else to you call someone like that, and I’m still trying to get the stink of trash off me today.

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal