Preludes — John Brooks

When a nine-year-old boy in a "respectable," middle class family is raped, then repeatedly molested by his father, how does the boy experience the abuse and how does he manage to survive?"Preludes," an extended short story based in significant part on the experiences of its author, a child sexual abuse survivor, answers these questions. The boy wakes in the middle of the night to find his father sitting on the edge of his bed, gently shaking him from his sleep. Though confused by his father's unexpected presence, for a few brief moments he suspects nothing. His father then accuses him of having misbehaved without saying how, and tells him he'll have to be punished. The boy initially protests, but then, sensing the futility of resistance, grudgingly prepares himself for what his father tells him will be a spanking, all the while thinking, "Gee, this is ridiculous-I haven't done anything wrong." His father then proceeds to rape him, and, the rape completed, threatens to murder him if he tells anyone, including his mother. Thus begins the boy's struggle for survival in the face of his father's nightly onslaughts-a struggle that stretches the boy's physical, psychological, and emotional resources to their limits and beyond. Adding to his struggle's immensity is the milieu in which it occurs: a "Pleasantville" middle class neighborhood in a mid-sized American city in the early 1960s-an environment that gives no indication, on its surface, that an atrocity of such proportions could take place within its hermetic confines. The boy's family enjoys a high status-the father is a professor at a prestigious university, and the family belongs to a Presbyterian church that counts among its members some of the city's most prominent citizens. It is an environment in which acknowledgement of even the merest possibility of child sexual abuse within a family as respectable as that of the boy's is as taboo as the abuse itself. Sensing these constrictions, the boy feels his isolation in his