Chapter 1
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
I wasn’t born evil. No child enters this world with malice in their heart, but I was born in a desolate wasteland of neglect, warped by the cruelty of indifference, and destined to live a life of starvation in every sense of the word.
Hunger is the driving force behind everything.
It holds the transformative power capable of warping the gentlest of souls into human monsters.
Starvation in all its forms dismantles morality.
The desperation born from hunger blinds us to our shockingly fragile humanity, twists our perception, and distorts the line between good and evil until it is nothing but a blurred shadow in the darkness of our needs.
We hunger for many things in life. I learned early on of the lengths humans will go, the depravities some are capable of, at the tender age of six…
“ D on’t cry, Damien,” my older half-brother admonished me. “There’s a reason why people call scorpions land lobsters .”
I sat on a rock, watching in horror as Dominick crushed the head and then skewered the nearly six-inch-long Arizona Giant Hairy we’d captured earlier that night.
Its body twitched as he held it over our small fire.
The moisture in whatever guts it had within the exoskeleton sizzled… the body seizing in the licking flames.
At least it died quickly.
I glanced at the box of remaining scorpions we’d captured with the UV flashlight Dominick stole from his science class and considered kicking it over.
The rest were puny Striped Tails, barely larger than two inches, and a few slightly bigger Bark Scorpions.
This Giant Hairy was the only of its kind we’d come across.
All the others were quite common in the Arizona desert where we lived.
“I’m not that hungry,” I lied.
“ Bullshit . Last time either of us ate was school lunch on Friday, and I’m hungry .”
My stomach growled of its own volition as I thought about pizza day at school. It was only Saturday night, and noon on Monday seemed so far away.
“ See,” Dominick smirked as I wrapped my arms around my aching stomach, unable to muffle the grumbling sounds. “I’m gonna try it. You can eat a pincher first. They taste like shellfish and crunch like popcorn.”
“When have you eaten shellfish? That’s rich people food.”
“ Well, if they eat it, it must be good, right?” Dominick shot me another sly grin.
“ I guess… But why do they glow ?” I asked, trying not to imagine an insect crunching between my teeth. “We should just go pick some more nopalitos… Maybe we shouldn’t eat these. What if they’re radioactive ? My teacher said the government used to test bombs in the desert.”
Dominick laughed. “They aren’t radioactive . Scientists would have told us. Nobody knows what makes scorpions glow. It’s a mystery. They’re magic .”
“Magic?”
“Yeah, little bro. Did you know scorpions have been on the earth since before the dinosaurs? They’ve lived through every extinction event. Talk about survivors.”
“That one didn’t fare too well.” I stared at the blackening legs of the arachnid on Dominick’s makeshift Palo Verde skewer.
“Mr. Dosela said that when you eat an animal, you can take its powers into you. That’s part of the magic.”
Mr. Dosela had been one of Dom’s teachers and football coach.
He was part Apache and often spoke of his beliefs and Native legends, tying them into the lessons he taught.
Dom seemed to really like him and would relay the stories Mr. Dosela told him.
He was one of the few teachers who didn’t look at us like we were poor, fatherless trash.
Back then, I’d hoped to be in one of his classes when I reached the fifth grade.
“Scorpions are tough and fierce,” Dom went on, playfully shoving my arm and knocking me off balance. The bottom of my worn sneaker scraped down the side of the rock, planting flat against the desert as I caught myself. “Don’t you want to be tough and fierce, little bro?”
“Yeah…” I reluctantly conceded, repositioning myself. The night air had a slight chill, but my rock retained a comfortable warmth from baking in the sun all day. “How do you know when it’s done cooking?”
“When it all turns white, and the ends of the legs are black,” Dom replied, slowly twisting the scorpion. “It’s almost done, but we want to make sure any parasites die.”
“Parasites!”
“I’m just joking,” he said, a little too quickly.
“No, you’re not!”
“It’s fine, Damien. I’ll make it well done, okay? Let it ride, you little wimp.”
“I’m not a wimp,” I griped.
Dom chuckled. “You won’t be… if you eat the scorpion .”
I went to sleep that night with a child’s worry of arachnids crawling around in my stomach, though it hadn’t been the dreams that stirred me from sleep. The camper’s odd silence initially woke me, a false impression of peace and quiet.
Our tin camper in the desert was neither of those things.
Dominick and I shared the only bedroom. The bathroom had a toilet, a pedestal sink, and a shower stall barely bigger than a pair of school lockers.
Hot water was a rarity, but I didn’t mind so much in the summer months.
We didn’t often have a working AC unit. Our kitchen consisted of a sink beneath two crooked, usually empty cabinets, with a small counter upon which sat our microwave and plug-in single stove-top.
Mom’s couch and near constant place of business sat in the middle of it all, across from our outdated, rabbit-eared television set. I don’t even remember when that stopped working. With three bodies coexisting within such small quarters, it was never silent.
“ Dom?” Even my whisper seemed loud.
Nothing.
I dropped down from the top bunk with a soft thud on the scratchy, worn carpet. My brother wasn’t in his bed. The digital clock sitting on the dresser we shared read three-thirty. Where could he be? It wasn’t as if we lived near anything. Even our school was over ten miles from home.
I crept into the living room to find my mother in her usual condition…comatose on the couch with a burning cigarette glowing in the ashtray on the small coffee table. At least she hadn’t fallen asleep with it between her fingers again.
I reached for the door to look around outside, but it suddenly opened, and Dominick entered. He appeared upset with his head low and shoulders hunched, until he realized I was standing in the middle of the camper with him.
“Go back to bed, Damien.” His voice sounded so hollow, and he wouldn’t look at me.
“Who else you got in there with you?” a much louder, much older man’s voice boomed from outside.
I craned my neck to look past my half-brother.
A man stood beneath the single light post. He was stocky and had a dirty look about him.
He stared back at me with bloodshot eyes, wearing a sinister grin while he buckled his belt.
An uneasy feeling washed over me in that moment.
Although, in my innocence at the time, I didn’t understand why.
“You got what you wanted… Get the fuck out of here,” Dominick snapped at him. “ He’s only six, for fuck’s sake.”
He slammed the door shut on the peculiarly disheveled man.
Our mother hadn’t even stirred.
I watched Dominick step around me to grab her cigarette. He pulled a long drag as if he really needed it. I’d never seen him smoke. Dom was only four and a half years older than me, and he didn’t even cough.
“Go to bed, Damien. We’ll get up early, and I’ll take you to get breakfast on our way to school.”
“How?” Mom couldn’t even afford enough groceries to get us through a whole week. In my six years of life, I could have counted on one hand, with digits to spare, how many times we’d actually been out to eat anywhere.
Dominick held out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill.
“How’d you get that?” I asked. “That man gave it to you? Why?”
Dominick’s eyes shifted toward our broken blinds above the TV as an engine started outside. The timing belt shrieked just before the truck roared loudly and took off.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, crushing out the rest of the cigarette in the overfilled ashtray. “I’m gonna shower. For realz, go to bed, little bro. I’ll wake you up when we’re leaving.” Dom walked the couple of steps into the bathroom and softly shut the door behind him.
I lingered near the bathroom for a moment. There was something very off about my brother. I distinctly recall the sound of him crying that night.
Four years passed before I understood why…