I arrived home one day with our mother. We found blood on the floor of our mother’s room. We found Leslie in there as well. He had his hand over his nose. It was covered in blood. He was crying.

We asked him what had happened. He struggled to speak, however, chocking back tears he managed to tell us what happened, he told us that his father had ripped his wart right off his nose, literally right off his face.

I turned and told our mother what I always told her whenever she would leave Leslie home alone with his father. I told her it was her fault because she knows that he always uses it as an opportunity to attack Leslie, yet she continues to leave him home alone with him.

Our mother called our father and confronted him about what he did. He tried to make the case that the whole thing was Leslie’s fault for having the wart on his nose! Such was his demented insanity!

Later on I told our mother that she had to take Leslie to the hospital to have the wart checked out because her mother, my maternal grandmother had told us that Leslie was born with a defect in his heart that was undiagnosed and would get worse over time, these warts were a symptom of that defect.

I was shocked when she started making excuses about why she couldn’t do that. Initially she was concerned about how much it would cost. I told her she only had to have him checked first, treatment could be arranged at a later date.

She went into a litany of other excuses and I asked her if she was aware that of what kind of life Leslie would live if he had to live with this condition undiagnosed.

I was completely taken away when I realized that our mother was completely OK with the idea of Leslie living with this condition. I can still see the expression on her face and the look in her eyes. Then I remembered the rest of what my grandmother had told me and I felt very sorry for my little brother. Very, very sorry indeed!

Author’s note: The exact date and time of the following events are not known. They have had to be approximated in order to post the content.