Diamond Daughter 1
By Steve
- 299 reads
I'm really good at math. I'm damned good at math. My father is a very smart man, but he never went to college. He taught me math when I was very little. I was four when he started to teach me math. I liked numbers immediately. He told me numbers were my friends.
At first, numbers felt like things. They did not feel like stuffed animals, but things like toilet paper or spoons. A fork had 4 prongs. I had 2 eyes, one nose, 10 fingers, and one stomach. Numbers were everywhere. Numbers were in the Bible too. My father loved the Bible and read to me from the Bible every night. 40 days of rain. So many tears of God for the souls of men drowning. 40 days in the desert. Jesus. He must have been angry. Was he counting the days to the end of his fast? When I don't eat, I get angry.
My father said that 7 was the number of completion. 7 days of the week. He called me Lucky Seven. I was his lucky seven.
When I turned 7, he began to give me weekly quizzes on numbers. Sometimes it was mutiplication, sometimes it was fractions. If I got anything wrong, he would shut me in my room for an hour. If it was winter and snowing, I was forced to walk barefoot with my pants pulled up in the snow for an hour. Those were lonely moments. All I could think of was the darkness of being wrong. All I could think was that getting the wrong answer on a quiz was a very dark thing. Walking in the snow or being in a dark room for an hour made me imagine such terrible and strange things. I would tell you these things, but I'm afraid that you'll get scared.
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