Photos By Becks

When I saw that letter in the mailbox today... My heart stopped. She didn't need this, not on her birthday. With trepidation in my heart, I trudged slowly inside, clutching the envelop. She's on the phone with her sister, recieving birthday cheer, when a single eyecatching glance at the mail on the table wipes that from her face. Douglas County Jail is the second line on the return address. The first, of course, is his name. The name that still strikes fear and foreboding into my veins. But we luck out, this time; he's merely sending a hand drawn birthday note to our mother. My brother; so easy, so, so easy, to hate him when he's here... So easy to understand from a distance.

Jacob Andrew Bergeron was the third of four sons. He carried his mother's fair, pale skin and blue-green eyes. Nothing like his father in appearance, and so, that was his doom. Their father was a bastard. Cruel, cold, calculating. The kind of man that would tell his son that because he doesn't favor him in looks, he must be his whore mother's bastard child and not his. The kind of man that would regulate food for his sons when they lived with him. They had to ask his permission to get anything to eat from the kitchen. He sent his third son to bootcamp at thirteen because of a single infraction. A mistake probably propelled by the false accusation his father informed him of that same year. In bootcamp, they tried to rape him. They didn't succeed, but that kind of horror cannot be undone. After that, he didn't go back to his dad's, but inserted himself in my life in between jail stays.

No amount of therapy could fix his psychosis. Jake had always been a little batshit, a little temperamental (when I was seven, he chased Jamie around the house with a butcher knife threatening to kill him, but he probably was just mad), and his experiences living with his father, going to bootcamp, and having our mother (where do you think Jake got his crazy from?) as well, our mother, going in and out of jails, it only made it worse.

By the time he was seventeen he was holding a gun to Jamie's head cracked out on cocaine threatening to murder him. If Jamie hadn't of gotten out, he would probably be dead.

Jake is basically Schizoid Personality with a side order of bipolar manic type I. Try living with someone like that. It's hell. I walked on eggshells for thirteen years. I had a goddamn ULCER because of the stress of it. I don't know how Jamie shared a room with him. Last time... I couldn't handle living in the same HOUSE.

So... As much as I understand Jake, feel for his history... He is the bastard that destroyed my childhood.

So as she looks at his little note with a smile on her face, the chill never quite leaves my bones because I know it's just another manipulation.

A liar knows a liar and a con knows a con.

The only difference is that I'm not crazy, and I'm not evil. But I learned to manipulate and I learned how to lie because I had to survive, and you can't unlearn something that innate. Mostly, I use my gifts for good. Or at least render them harmless.

I don't torture people for sport. Jake did. Animals too.