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now interrupted Jake's torturous thoughts. Julia was impatiently banging her spoon to get Jake's attention.

Jake's eyes flicked momentarily as he attempted to break his pain, to stay with us, but the call of yesterday was too great and he succumbed to the voices in his head. After years of talking with him about his dissociated paper and pie state, I was able to narrate his head talk as though I was there. His story had also become mine because I had seen and heard it so many times before.

"You useless whore," Jake's louder internal voice from the past screamed over our child's immediate need for sweetness. "You're nothing but a stupid slag. If it wasn't for you I'd be President of the company by now." An ear-splitting crack across the face of Jake's mother, kids running to hide and another onslaught of verbal abuse. "Now take those disgusting things out of your hair and go and buy sugar. How's a man supposed to go to work without having had sugar on his toast. Useless, stupid piece of sh...!"

"Leave my mother alone," Jake yelled at the person who was supposed to be his father, his protector, his role model. "If you ever hit my mother again I'll kill you."

Pushing his chair backward, Jake's father arose, smiling acidly, and grabbed Jake by the shoulder. He pulled Jake into the laundry and he showed Jake who the real boss in the house was. Jake's mother attempted to protect him and sent his younger siblings next door for help. The neighbors did not come. They fed Jake's siblings and took them to school along with their own children. Before Jake's father stormed off to his all-important job that the family were holding him back from, Jake's mother got a further beating for trying to stop the father's behavioral modification of Jake.

In the Emergency Department, Jake's mother tried to get the story clear with Jake before they each spoke to the Nurses and Doctor.

"A car accident," Jake's mother pleaded to him. "No, no. They'll call the insurance and Police. A break-in and assault. No, they'll still call the police."

"The truth Mother," Jake croaked through his swollen and blood stuck together lips. "The truth. The Doctor can make him stop." Jake's eyes were swollen shut and he couldn't see her reaction to telling the truth.

"Now listen hear young man," oh hooray, Jake's Mother was becoming the perpetrator. It always happened like that apparently. "Your father is just a little stressed at the moment. Things are not going too well at work and we need to support him. He

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