Isosceles Triangle

2 > lethal torture or cowardly death

"How do I even begin to explain the origin of the torture I faced? It's pretty obvious that I was born into it; that I don't need to explain. I just don't know where to start."

"What's the earliest memory? What can you remember?" Nurse Kaitlyn queries.

"Well, I remember nearly everything in almost perfect detail. It's just how to put it all in chronological order," I say.

"Hmm. Actually, why don't you start off by giving me background information of your life: family, friends, lifestyle. That'll probably help you with putting the pieces together."

"Oh, wow. Um, I'll have to really dig deep to remember what Dare had always told me. It's pretty complicated." I look down, twiddling my fingers as I reminisce. 

"Who's Dare?" Nurse Kaitlyn asks. 

"My oldest brother. Also known as: the source of all the pain that has ever occurred in my life." My jaw tightens as images of Dare fill my mind.

"How so?"

I twitch. "He took a lifestyle that my parents created, took it to higher levels, and held me hostage in it for my entire life. He held a lot of people hostage in it when everyone was too young to even comprehend the situation."

"What do you mean by that?"

"We were a gang. A violent one."

The gang started off years and years before I was born. Every other year, Dare would tell the gang about what it used to be and how it was formed. I've heard the tale so many times.

Our gang was formed by my parents, Scar (Scarlet) and Henry, in 1984 when they still lived in the United States. They named it Back Stabs for many obvious reasons. One, it sounded tough, and I guess that's the impression they bestowed upon other people. Two, that was their specialty: back stabbing both figuratively and literally.

Back Stabs had over fifteen members in it; all of which are parents of the current members. All of them were well over the age of seventeen at the time. I guess they had different standards then. Each member had committed dozens and dozens of crimes and have been arrested countless times. I remember Dare told me that two of the members, Carl Joiner and Barry Barker, were imprisoned for life after massacring five people for no apparent reason.

Dare looked up to them.

Before imprisonment, Carl and Barry both had kids that eventually joined the gang. Carl had a kid named Dallas, who was the perfect definition of a Carl Joiner mini-me. Barry had a kid named Blake, who we call Blade now. Carl and Barry's wives were both victims of the "Carl and Barry Massacre", so both Dallas and Blade grew up with one of the other gang members.

Anyway, after those two bozos were tossed in the cooler, the rest of the members continued to cause  all kinds of trouble. In 1989, right after Dare was born, Back Stabs was marked "Most Violent Gang in the United States". It was hard for them to even show their faces in common public areas because it was a huge risk of getting them all narced on. So the next year, Back Stabs relocated to Toronto and claimed Glenn Park as their neighborhood. Literally. They all bought houses there and claimed an empty field in the neighborhood as theirs. Whoever stood in their way wished they hadn't.

The gang did eventually break apart, though. In 2004, seven years after my twin brother Twist and I were born, both of my parents died in a drunken argument. Without their leaders, the other members had no idea what to do. I think they began to realize that they were getting a little too old for being in a gang. They all had kids and wives (well, at least most of them still had wives), and they probably got burned out of the whole committing crimes. That's my theory at least.