When I Was Your Age

When I was your age, we were force-marched by your Uncle John, the child-molesting preacher, to school every morning at gunpoint, whipped by lengths of combined catgut, uphill both ways, twelve miles in driving snow, dodging wooly mammoths and sabertooth tigers.  Mama put meat around our necks so they’d play with us, because we weren’t good children.

Mama used to say, “You damned kids, cleanliness is next to Godliness!” while beating us--mostly Billy, the incorrigible sap--with runed branches from Yggdrasil until we bled white.  

We weren’t very clean.  

Poor Billy made a pitchfork covered in flames, once.  He impaled Sally with it, right through the eye, because Sally shot him in the ass with a homemade, poisoned blow dart.  After the inevitable beating, Mama told us to walk it off.  And we did.

That was a long time ago, before all this modernity.

Back then, your Uncle used to really punish us.  You’re too young to remember, but he evicted a couple of cousins for eating from his orchid.  He burnt down some people’s houses, too.  Didn’t like ‘em.  They were queer, he said.  Your Dad isn’t in his will any longer.  He and your Uncle quarreled.  That’s how your Dad got to be boss of Hell.