Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 5, Issue 6 | Page 7

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Life Stories

THE HELL I CALLED MY LIFE
CHERYL PIERSON CUCCIO
This is the prologue to my memoir currently in work. You cannot imagine what it
is like to live the life I did unless you’ve walked in those shoes. If you were unlucky
enough to, you know I’m not making this up. Hopefully you were not one of those
people.

I was only sixteen years old when I hired a schoolmate to kill my father.
No one could have understood the Hell I lived in every day, because I was too
terrified to say anything. My mother was stricken with a terminal kidney disease
when I was ten and despite two kidney transplants, was an invalid for the rest of
her short life.
At age eleven, my father began to abuse me physically and mentally. By the time I
was fourteen those years could have been considered child’s play. Abuse and
sexually driven touching turned into intercourse any time of the day he felt the
urge. My heart clutched whenever he called me into his bedroom to “watch TV” as
my mother, who was fighting for her life, slept on the sofa in our living room. What
kind of a man does that to his young daughter?
Something finally snapped in me when he threatened to satisfy his desires with my
eight-year-old sister. My life as his sex slave began with him wrestling with me and
watching TV in his bed, and now he was doing the same with her. I recognized the
threat of could come next in his eyes and in his taunts.
Throughout my trial and afterward newscasters speculated, righteous people
pointed their fingers at me and relatives on my father’s side lambasted me. People
who said I wasn’t telling the truth made up all sorts of reasons why I wanted him
dead and insisted I was lying about the abuse because no reports of abuse had been
filed. It didn’t matter whether it was someone who was concerned or someone who
was spewing hatred—none of them had an understanding of what I’d endured or
how successfully my father programmed and controlled me. They couldn’t feel the
terror that filled me every minute of every day.
Why didn’t I tell anyone? The answer was simple—an echo of the one given by the
majority of abuse victims. My father, James Pierson, was seen as a wealthy,
respected member of the community. If it came back to him that I’d accused him of
abuse, he’d only deny it—maybe even call it a child’s imagination, but one thing
was absolutely certain. I would pay the price.
Behind the closed doors of our nice house my life was a nightmare of his making.
What would anyone have thought if I said my father—a man who lived by bizarre
but

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