The Pirate, Part II (or, What Crimes Have You Committed Against David Miscavige?)

Parnell Litro 1
Confidential: This is the audit of the Riverboat Prince (Session 1)

Age: 9

Sex: Male

Guardians: The Pirate – Biological Father (OT III) and the Mermaid – Partner of Biological Father (OT I – Suspected SP)


Recall a secret.

Veins don’t breathe until a blade falls, son—is what the Pirate says to me […]

Thank you. Recall a secret.

His frown, branding the base of her throat, stills when his hips meet hers in staccato kisses, in thrusts and stabs though he breathes poison into her ear, bites the skin beneath her jaw, and claws at her joints with digits slender like bare branches.

I hate the curved space between her back and the mattress; her spine rises, sloping like a bridge to be climbed, a pinnacle, and the Pirate’s limbs skew like swastikas while I build blocks on blocks until a land bound fleet rests in my palm […]

Thank you. Recall a secret.

My armada is housed by sailors with poor eyesight and ulcers and gonorrhea who curse the way women speak without being spoken to; men with money long gone, whose maps have never been seen by others, these traitors, the Pirate and his kind, have ribs like ladder rungs and bone armor waiting to be broken. But my are pockets swollen with silence and freshwater shellfish, overripe berries now bleeding, I’m not hers, just a starlet, her mute darling, her pup who will never meet Jesus and when she sinks into the mattress she […]

Thank you. Complete the secret […]

The Pirate makes her seep between her legs in the swelling seasons, like my mother and says she’ll make a proper Mermaid one day. But she loves him, the peg-legged savior, deck-ridden sailor, galactic river boat Captain who will outlive all wars in his service of one billion years and I’ll earn penance too, like the sea commanders before us […]

Thank you. Recall a secret.

I hear no hymns, no prayers, no benedictions. The Pirate only tastes communion in the dark, through a sweat-stained bed sheet and lets me watch […]

Thank you. Recall a secret.

The power cord slung around my neck looped twice and was knotted to the pole between her stovetop and the pullout bed. I circled, with the slack of my lead taut in a thin ribbon of rope while I watch […]

Thank you. Complete the secret […]

He’s the worst storyteller of all, my daddy the Pirate—he’s the worst storyteller of all, the laziest murderer there’s ever been, on ocean or on land […]

Thank you. Recall a secret.

This is the voyage that she chose. God bless her.

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