Deep in the valley, below the mountain and in the hill lived my father. Yes, I said in the hill. It’s quite a lovely home really it has two small rooms for sleeping, and a big room that we did most everything else in. Well at least I did, dad spent most of the day hunting, and when he wasn’t hunting he was eating or sleeping. Dad built that house himself, years before I was born, he told me. He said he thought my mother would like it, and I think she did, before she left, that is.
I was only five or six years old when she left, it took me completely by surprise. Although now I understand better why she did it, at the time I was very naive. Mom said she couldn’t stand the smell any more. She said we lived like pigs; worse than pigs, we lived like rats. She informed me once that if she spent too much time in that rat hole with that pig that she might learn to like the stink. I don’t think she liked that idea, but then I never noticed the odor.
Dad tried to keep her happy, he brought her the best food he could find, flowers to make our home smell nice and he even tried to take a bath once. That nearly solved her problems. He was too fat to swim, but he said he just waited till he sank to the bottom and walked out. Mom was devastated, for days she prayed he’d catch cold and die. His luck held though and he never caught so much as a sniffle.
I think that was when she tried to take matters into her own hands. I suspect she’d been daydreaming about such things for years, every morning after he’d gone hunting, stewing over the best way to bump him off over her morning tea. This time, though, she was serious.
First she tried to beat him to death in his sleep with a thick club, but it only made him think she wanted to have more children. Then she tried to poison him with fox’s glove and nightshade, but it didn’t do him any harm and it convinced him her attitude had changed, after all she couldn’t hate it there so much if she was spicing up the food. She eventually tried one desperate attempt with a pillow over his face while he was sleeping and it worked remarkably well, by the time he woke up enough to figure out what was going on, he didn’t have enough energy left to give her much of a struggle.
She left the minute he stopped moving, fled right out of the front door, leaving me behind. I wondered for the longest time afterwards why she didn’t go before. Then I realized it was his temper. She was probably afraid that if she left him alive he’d go after her and drag her back.
She was right of course; I tried to run when I was about nineteen, I only made it a few hours before he came home and found me gone. I guess it was all that time in our domicile that made me slow, but then he’d spent all that time hunting and knew how to track things down too. Oh if only she’d actually killed him that night.
Apparently mom didn’t have the upper arm strength it would have taken to kill him, she just kept enough oxygen from going to his brain that it knocked him out or something. By the time he woke up the next morning she was long gone, and he was angry. He ripped the place apart and put big holes in the walls with his fists. I’d never seen him that angry before. He was growling, screaming and foaming at the mouth. It was then I saw the monster everyone else did, it was then that I began to understand why mom left.
In the years that I lived with my father, I did little else than clean the cave and prepare the food he brought home, and hide when his temper got to bad. He hit things when he got mad, and if you happened to be standing in the way, you where it. No wonder mom left. I started to plan leaving too, but now dad put a big rock in front of his room to keep himself safe at night. I couldn’t move it, it was far too big for me, but dad could push it out of the way so fast. If he thought I was leaving you’d think that boulder was made of bird feathers.
So I was pretty grateful when the men came and killed him. They were apparently angry with him for trying to steal their virgins and killing their cows. He only hurt one of them before they put a shiny stick into his gut. The poor man fell across last week’s meat and into dad’s bone collection. The man didn’t die but it made the other men really angry to see him hurt so they killed dad very quickly afterwards.
Thankfully mom was one of those virgins he’d actually stolen. I say thankfully because I looked like her and not him. She at least was human, and I’d have been killed too, if I’d looked like a troll.