They say all the problems you drown in as an adult start as a single drop in your childhood.
If your parents were always screaming, you grow up with your voice sharpened on the same edge. And if they tore each other apart, you spend your life tearing apart anyone who gets close enough.
I don't know if that's really what psychologists say, or if it's just an excuse we hang our cruelty on.
All I know is that I'm writing these words from inside a psychiatric hospital, and I still don't know: am I really insane? Or did I choose madness because the only other option was to stay weak?
My father and mother are here too, in the same hospital.
You'll say that's strange. But if you'd seen our house when I was a child, you'd only wonder how madness waited this long to take us in.
I won't tell you my name. Call me whatever you want: a monster, a victim, a curse. In the end, it doesn't matter.
A Daily Feast of Blood
When I first became aware of what was around me, my parents didn't look completely insane. Not from the outside, at least. They loved me in their own way, fed me, kept a roof over my head. But there was something twisted in their habits that I only understood much, much later.
They loved torturing animals.
We didn't eat vegetables, or fruit, or anything light. Only meat. Beef and pork, over and over. The fridge was a red mouth that never closed, dripping blood. My father would drag animals into the yard, slaughter them there, and my mother helped him wash the blood away as if she were doing the dishes.
No chicken. No fish. No eggs. Just meat, then meat, then meat.
Of course I ate what they ate—there were no other choices. And of course I learned what they had learned: that anything weaker than you exists to have its belly opened.
The Cursed One on the Field
At school, the boys avoided me. They wouldn't play with me, wouldn't talk to me. They looked at me the way you look at a stray dog: never close enough to reach out, never far enough to feel safe. That hurt me more than my parents' screaming and beating each other in the night.
One day, we were picking football teams. One by one, they called out names. I stood there, smiling, waiting for someone to call mine. There was only one spot left, and one of them turned to me and said out loud:
"We're not playing with him. He's cursed."
I sat at the side of the pitch, watching them play, my heart hammering at my ribs, and a voice in my head whispering: pick up a rock and smash your own skull until this story ends.
But I didn't hit myself.
Another boy showed up late. They spoke with him for a moment, then let him join the team, taking the spot that should have been mine. I looked at them and felt something inside me crack. Not all at once, but like a long fissure in old ice.
I didn't hate all of them. I hated only one… the one who took my place.
The First Stone
That night, I followed him home. Darkness had swallowed the street, and the few lamps were weak and far apart. He was riding his little bike, calm, as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't taken anything from me. I walked in the shadows, watching him.
Near his house, the road narrowed and ran between trees with no lighting. I waited until he slowed down, until he wobbled a little, then stepped out from behind a tree and shoved a thick branch into the spokes of his bike.
He flipped. His small body flew onto the asphalt and slammed into the ground hard.
He didn't see me coming. I had stones in my pocket I'd picked out earlier; smooth on one side, sharp on the other. I took them out and started hitting his head with them. Once. Twice. Ten times. I didn't stop when he stopped moving; I stopped when my arm gave out.
I left him there, and went home.
That night, in the shower, the warm water dragged the blood and dirt down the drain, and I felt something I'd never felt before. It wasn't regret. It wasn't fear. It was pure happiness.
The ecstasy of revenge, as if I had finally shoved back one of the many hands that had been pushing me down my whole life.
Worse Than Death
The next day at school, the teacher told us a classmate of ours had had "an accident" and was now in the hospital, in a coma. She asked us to pray for his recovery and to wish him back.
That was how I learned he wasn't dead.
The first thing I felt wasn't horror. It was disappointment. But the months passed, and he stayed suspended between life and death, while I went to school, played, slept, ate… and I realized this was worse than death.
A year later, he woke up. But he wasn't the same person. He didn't walk the way he used to, didn't remember the way he used to, and his friends started whispering and mocking him behind his back.
I had shrunk him down to the size they had once made me feel.
A Confession to Father
When I was a little older, I decided to tell my father what I'd done. I expected him to slap me, to scream, to march me to the police himself. But he listened in silence. Then he nodded his head and said quietly:
"Good. Never forgive anyone who wrongs you. Whoever steps on you—step on them."
That night, I slept like a baby. For the first time, I felt that what I had done was… "right." That in his eyes I wasn't a monster, but a son defending himself the way he was supposed to.
From that moment on, revenge became a taste that never left my mouth.
The Smell That Reached the Neighbors
My father kept slaughtering animals in the yard. The smell of blood and rotting flesh began creeping into the neighbors' houses. They complained. The police came, knocked on our door, and asked about the source of the smell.
My father answered coldly:
"I was slaughtering a pig in the garden… that's all."
They didn't like the scene. The amount of blood, the discarded entrails, the look in his eyes as he spoke about slaughter like it was a hobby. They called in a psychiatrist. After a few questions and a short conversation off to the side, they decided my father wasn't just an eccentric man. He was dangerous. They took him to a psychiatric hospital. The first one in the family to be officially committed.
The Vase and Mother
It was just me and my mother now. And without my father, she changed. Everything that was twisted in her grew sharper. She became more nervous, more violent. One day she got into a fight with a coworker and smashed a glass vase over her head. This time the police came for her. Another psychiatrist. Another report. Another diagnosis: a danger to herself and others. Psychiatric hospital, again.
I was alone in the house. At first I thought I'd finally be able to breathe without their screaming, their blood, their eyes weighing the food on my plate.
But the anger came back, looking for a new place to live.
The Screwdriver
One day, I walked into a supermarket to buy a beer. When I got to the cashier, he asked for my ID. I told him I didn't have it. He refused to sell it to me, pushed me with his hand, and threw me out of the shop like a piece of trash.
That was my second victim.
I waited outside, beside the shop, watching the employees leave. At night, he came out, talking with a friend. They split up at the parking lot and he was left alone. He got into his car and drove. I followed from a distance.
I thought I'd lost him when he turned down a strange street, but in the end I saw his car parked in front of a dull-looking building. I was about to give up and turn back when I saw him stepping out of the car again, walking back toward the shop… he must have forgotten something. I didn't think long. I walked up behind him, with a screwdriver in my pocket I'd been carrying "just in case." I drove it into his neck. Once. Twice. Then I walked on.
The city didn't change. No lights went out. Nothing collapsed. Just one less man who'd believed he had the right to push me into the street.
From that moment, it became simple: anyone who hurt me, insulted me, looked down on me… if I could reach them, I made them pay. I never started anything with anyone. I never hurt someone who hadn't hurt me first. I was just… balancing the scales.
Alone in the House
Years later, my mother's episodes got worse, and she went from being a "difficult mother" to an "official danger." The police took her, and the doctors decided to admit her to the same hospital as my father.
A social worker came to me. She asked if I wanted to go to a shelter with other children. I told her I'd rather stay alone. She hesitated for a moment, but agreed. She left me in that house, with a silence too large for me.
A Visit to the Ward
Two years passed before I visited my parents at the hospital for the first time. They were destroyed; eyes lost, hands trembling, tongues heavy. Neither of them seemed to recognize me. For a moment I felt a burning in my chest, something like pity. Then I remembered who had taught me that blood was a game, that meat was a daily meal, that a blow could only be answered with a heavier blow. And I remembered the neighbors who had called the police because of the smell coming from our house. They too had to pay.
The Couple and the Grandson
They were an elderly couple living with their young grandson. I knew the grandson left early and came back late. One night, I waited until the lights went out. Opening their door wasn't difficult. I went straight to their bedroom. They were asleep. I found a metal bar in the hallway and used it. The woman didn't have time to scream. The man started to shout, but I cut the sound short with another piece of iron.
I was about to leave, getting ready to close the door behind my crime, when I felt a hand grab my hair from behind and slam my head into the wall. The grandson. He was stronger than I'd thought. Before I could understand, I was on the floor, his knee on my chest, the air cut off from my lungs. He called the police, and they came. There were no more "excuses," no "unfortunate accident," no "coma."
The Same Cage
They sentenced me to life. But not in a normal prison. Here. They said I was too dangerous to leave in the world, and too sick to be thrown into a cell with other inmates. So they locked me up in the same place they'd locked up my father and mother.
We were reunited. One big family, cut off from the world, gathered in a single building full of closed doors.
You might wonder how you're reading my story now. There's a nurse here who loves stories. She told me I should write, "so people understand you." She gave me paper and a pen, and left me with more time than I need.
I still don't know whether I'm truly insane… or just a child of a childhood that made me into what it wanted, and then threw me into the only place that looks like it. Either way, this is my home now. And if childhood makes monsters, the only justice we got… is that they put us all in the same cage.
— The End —
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