• The first of his memories was not a pleasant one. He had spent years replaying it in his mind and the pain that he felt hadn’t diminished in all those years. The memory of his father walking through the front door of the small house he had grown up in, without even looking back to say goodbye.When he had asked his mother why, she had told him that it was because his father had hated him. All men were devils and he was doomed to be a devil as well. Devils seduced women and made them give birth to more devils. Then they would abandon the women that they had deceived to raise the devil spawn on their own.He wasn’t an only child, but he was the only boy. And his mother had never let him forget that he was nothing more than an evil creature of an evil gender. He would never be as good as a woman, no matter how hard he tried.When he went out of his way to please her, she would smile and pat his head. The she would remind him that men were hell bound no matter what they did. He could never seek salvation since his very existence was an abomination before God.His days were spent in service to his mother and his sisters. For their entertainment, he would be forced to dress in wigs and girls clothing. They would put him in dresses and make him dance and sing while they screamed insults at him and laughed.When his sister did anything wrong, his mother would say that it was his fault. She told him that the girls had been tempted into evil by his mere presence. They weren’t to blame for his influence. And then she would beat him unmercifully.As he grew, he wasn’t allowed to attend school. Instead he and his sister were home schooled. That way they wouldn’t be exposed to the evils of the outside world. Mother wasn’t going to have her little girls being fondled by devils and she wasn’t going to allow him to join with his kind.His birthday every year was marked by the beating his mother would give him, while screaming at him that it was his fault his father had left them. It was his fault that she and her precious daughters had to live in poverty. The lashing would usually last until either he lost consciousness, or she tired herself out. Then he would be allowed to lie in the box that he slept in, beside the clothes dryer, until he was able to move and attend to his chores again.When he turned thirteen, his mother decided that he was growing too mature to be allowed to stay in the house with her beautiful daughters. She didn’t want him to turn them away from her teachings with his male devilish ways. He was moved to the tool shed in the backyard and fed once nightly in a dog dish that she would slide under the door.He made his first friends in that little building. The field mice that would come and go and run over the sleeping bag, in which he slept, were his pets and his confidants. He would feed them from his plate and tamed them slowly until at last they would even come up and sit in his hand. He loved them like he had loved no other creatures. He had found peace of a sort. And after years of torment, he had finally accepted his lot in life. He would die soon. If not form the cold that chilled the aluminum building at night, then from some illness that he would succumb to. But at least while he was here he had company.On his fourteenth birthday, his mother came out to retrieve him for his yearly thrashing. She screamed when she saw him holding the little mice, and said that he was learning to control the creatures of evil. She wasn’t going to allow this sort of witchcraft in her home or on her property. She kicked him in his face and, as the mice ran for safety, she stomped them to death. He screamed in anguish, begging her not to hurt his pets. But he knew that she wouldn’t stop. In panic he scanned the walls of the tool shed for anything that could help him in his defense of his beloved friends. He saw the axe and reached for it. Without even thinking twice, he swung the heavy blade at his mother and screamed for her to stop.The axe sunk into her back and, for a moment, it seemed as if all time and space stood still. Without a sound she sank to her knees and then fell, face first, onto the dirt floor.He pulled the axe from her back and raised it above his head again. All the rage, which had been building inside him over the years, strengthened the blows that he rained down on his mother. Until there was nothing left of her but a chunky pulp on the floor of the shed.He slumped back against the metal sheeting wall and huffed for breath. Looking down at the corpse, he realized that his mother had been right all along. He was a devil. Picking up the axe, he exited the shed and walked across the yard to back door of the house. Inside he could hear his sisters laughing and singing to the stereo. They had been allowed to torment him because they believed him to be nothing more than a demon in a human guise. But he was worse than that. He was evil incarnate, and it was time for him to be about his work.