I'm No Monster by Stefanie Marsh

Author:Stefanie Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

She remembers how it is outside but cannot see it. Cannot smell it. Instead she eats and sleeps and, in between, her father descends to the cellar: buoyant when she is compliant, brutal when she is not. The rapes carry on. Twice a day. It has become his routine, his lifeboat. Purging himself in the cellar. Up aboveground, there is no more peeping or spying. No more sexual assaults. There is no need.

When he is not there, she observes her shadow dancing on the wall; it is like another person with giant arms and legs. Or dwarfish, with a squashed head and plump little deformed legs. It is her body, but she has become afraid of it. Ever since the pregnancy, even her own body seems to be turning against her.

It is the same with her mind. All the assumptions she had about how her life was supposed to unfold, she must now review and discard. Now she regards hope, for so long her ally, as her enemy. Hope is a joke. Hope is dangerous for someone in her situation. There are only so many disappointments a person can take.

And all the while her depression deepens. All her thoughts are turning black. She gropes for an explanation. She fumbles around for a solution. But there is none. No remedy, either, for her loneliness. How will it end? Will she die here? Many times the thought has occurred to her to kill herself. She has wanted to cut her throat with a knife, but he has made it impossible. Is it a sin to take your own life when your life is no longer your own? Would death now be preferable to death ten, twenty years in the future? Her terror of waking is accompanied by an equally terrible fear of sleep. The specter of another pregnancy. The fear of giving birth. The dread of what would happen after the birth—because another pregnancy, she now knows, is unavoidable. Her father refuses to use contraception: “That is nothing for me,” he tells her. It will happen again. The horror of raising a child here. What would she tell it? How could she explain?

Alongside her doubts about whether she will ever escape, other doubts have crept up on her, a whole army of doubts: questions and fears that terminate in a fundamental uncertainty about who she is. “Was there something wrong with me?” She has lived in the cellar for more than three years. How can she be sure that she is not in some way to blame? The punishment fits the crime. What was her crime? Why had she been forsaken? There is no precedent. No example in history from which she can take comfort. This has never happened to anyone else before, ever.

If in the early days she thought of herself as a prisoner, now she knows that really she is a slave. A slave with a slave’s habit, she has noticed, of deluding herself that she is choosing to obey when, really, she is obliged to.

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