"Ready?" I asked her.

"Go!" she whispered.

Seeing your mother naked is not something you easily recover from. Seeing your mother naked and jumping from one side of a king-sized bed to the other with a nurse's hat on while your father, who is also naked, is chasing her with a bandanna around his neck, is reason to put yourself up for adoption. Fortunately, I took the first picture before anything had a chance to register. The second picture was of my father heading toward me with a belt.

My sister was already down the stairs when I came running out of my parents' room. I jumped all the way from the top of the stairs to the bottom. Luckily, I had perfected this jump months earlier during three consecutive snow days. I did not dare look behind me to see if my father and his penis were chasing me; I just kept running. We lived in a split-level house, so at the bottom of the big stairs, there was a shorter set of stairs to the right and to the left. I went left and my sister went right. I saw her head for the basement and followed her in. Our basement doubled as the laundry room; the one room in our house my father had never been in.

"Lock the door!" she barked, as she scrambled to hide under a pile of dirty clothes.

"Oh, my God, Dad has a belt," I told her.

"What?"

"A belt! He has a belt! I think he wants to hit us with it!"

"The one he wears with his pants?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "I think he wants to belt us!"

We were too scared to cry. This was it for me, I was sure of it. I was going to be murdered in my basement by my naked father, with a belt. I had never been hit by a belt before but had heard stories about it happening in poorer neighborhoods. Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and then banging on the door.