The Seven Deadly Sins Read Online Free PDF

ugly side of humanity.
    My sister and I were staying at the house of a “friend” of my mother’s after a barbecue one night. We were only a few miles away from home. I believe everyone stayed because everyone we came there with was loaded and did not want to drive drunk to get home or so they could get high in the morning and catch a free one before having to crawl back to the “responsibilities” of real life. What a crock. There was no shielding me and my sister. For years we were exposed to every source of hate and anger possible. What happens to you when everything happens to you?
    We were staying in the living room. I had one couch and my sister had the other. The house where we were staying was rented by some people I will refer to as Tom and Christine, mainly because I have worked very hard to forget their names. They were what I would call “professional adolescents” because they were in their thirties but still acted like they were sixteen. Watching delinquents play house is a lot like watching monkeys play poker: Just when it seems like they know what they’re doing, they shit on other people.
    Tom was out of work, but for all intents and purposes he was the most together of the two. He would actually hang out with the kids, make lunch, and take care of us. Christine was just a
plain fucking drunken drug addict. She was a hole for men to fill up because she thought it meant they cared about her. She had three kids from three different guys, all of whom Tom took care of—kudos for that. She was a second-hand woman in third-hand clothing—obnoxious, loud, and ignorant. She did not give a shit about anything, and it certainly showed. How Tom could live with her I will never understand. But he did not live with her for long.
    That night after the barbecue, Christine had bailed to go to another party. She did not even talk to anyone about it—just up and left her kids to go find more alcohol and bullshit. I believe my mom went with her because I do not remember where she slept that night. What I do remember is watching Tom get angrier and angrier as the hours went by and Christine still was not home. He put her kids to bed. She was still a no-show. He sat down to watch TV with me and my sister. Nothing. Sometime after that, we fell asleep on the couches. Tom passed out in the easy chair. Nobody had come home yet.
    I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on the door, screaming loudly. Just as I curiously raised my head, it became very obvious that the pounding was in fact kicking. Someone was kicking the door in because the deadbolt was engaged.
    It all happened in slow motion: Tom was jumping out of the recliner, the door was crashing open, and Christine was standing on the front steps with a forty-ounce Bud in her hand.
    Then Tom punched her in the face.
    Christine flew backward into the yard, too drunk to defend herself. She was yelling for help and calling Tom every name in the book at the same time. Tom heard nothing but the silence that had filled up the many hours she had been gone, leaving him with a house full of children who were not his own so these broken people could go fill their personal voids with the parties that
should have ended in high school. All he could feel was his feet kicking her in the back. Then he was on top of her choking her. In the distance I heard an unfamiliar voice warning the two bloody lovers that they had called the cops, but Tom did not care—all he could feel was the pain of neglect, of being taken advantage of, of being a disposable afterthought in comparison to his wants and needs. All he could do was give in to the rage that was welling up and venting from him like a renegade steam engine, ready to blow if someone had not hit the pressure valve in time. He was a bomb with two fists, Vesuvius with a pulse. He wanted to destroy.
    I watched it all, including the inevitable aftermath: Christine running away and Tom chasing after