Chapter 6. Leaving NashChat

Now you possibly wonder why it is I'm not killer, and yet seem to manage to avoid being murdered by one. Well I'll tell you a little story, I was riding on a electronic train going faster than sound. I was riding on a sleeper train, running away from my family back down in NashChat, Tennessee. I remembered the feeling of panic I had having attacked my father with a knife, and almost would have gotten him if my mom didn't put sense into me.

She wasn't exactly immune to being pushed into walls either by me, and I suppose in her mind she wasn't sure how far I would go. But keep in mind they were the ones belting me if I ran away from home, not the other way around. I wanted some other place to be, some place that was not home. Some place that wasn't there.

So me and Anna-Marie formed our own family.

The Marie-Tomatos.

At night I would have dreams of blood on Anna's face, I would here her crying faint tears. I would snuggle in her arms, and try to console her. After all it was the least I could do. It wasn't easy finding someone you thought was a man at first you could trust, and then only find out later that what you know about the relationship was a lie-insofar as what gender she thought I was. But eventually it became a normal family.

I could have a family again.

She could have a family again. And there was love to go around.

At nights we would go to the water parks, shoot at things at the fare, and eventually console her from time to time to assure her father wasn't there.

Because at the end of the day, she's just a bad girl.

She is a child at heart. A broken child, a girl who was never treated as a child, except insofar as being spared from execution by a single thread.

On some level she felt she already lost her head.

So give her this country song.