The Story of Rita Vater

My long burgundy dress swished around my legs as I took my place on the risers with my church’s youth choir. Jack had made me paint the entire exterior of our four-bedroom house in the blazing Arizona heat to earn the money to buy that dress, which I had worn for summer choir tour performances in California.

Today wasn’t a typical choir performance. We were singing to honor the memory of Jack, my controlling, mean stepfather, who had died earlier that week of a heart attack. Someone at the church thought it would be a good idea for the youth choir to sing at his memorial service, so here I was.

The congregation was small; my family changed churches every few years, and we hadn’t been at this one very long. My mother — who was 32 years old and eight months pregnant — my three younger sisters and my 2-year-old half-brother sat stoically on a pew.

A microphone loomed in front of me. Moments earlier, a few people had spoken into it about how good a man Jack was. Those people didn’t know that what they said wasn’t true.

I couldn’t take my eyes off that microphone. Everything in me wanted to break rank with the choir and step up to the device that would magnify my voice many times over. My words would carry to the farthest corners of that sanctuary, announcing to these deceived people who Jack really was. A child molester. A cruel and angry parent. A man who had turned my fun-loving mother into an emotionless robot. A stepfather who had visited my bedroom many nights …

Oh, if I only had the guts.

The Story of Timothy

From the new Alaska Prison book "Warriors of Transformation"

I yanked the thick boat canvas over my three sisters and me, where we shivered inside the tin-roof smokehouse. It was minus 30 degrees, and the loose straw stored for the dogs pricked our cheeks and caught in our hair. Even bundled up in heavy parkas, we weren’t much bigger than the Eskimo dolls sold as souvenirs in Anchorage. Aata (Dad) had tanned the seal skins for our mukluks (boots), and Aana (Mom) had sewn love into every stitch of our rabbit-fur parkas — but on long winter nights in Mountain Village, Alaska, when Aata poured homebrew into metal cups at the kitchen table, my parents hated each other.

Aata’s deep Yup’ik roar echoed like it came from an empty fuel barrel, and Aana’s screams pierced the thin walls of our clapboard house; our 20 sled dogs bounded out of their ramshackle dens and danced at the end of their chains. They yapped unhappily at the commotion in their master’s house and strung their laments together in one mournful song. Wide-eyed, my sisters and I listened as the dogs sang like an off-key church choir led by my father, until the door to our house slammed open.

“Shut up!” Aata bellowed in Yup’ik, and the dogs scrambled back into their houses like frightened children, hiding in their hay.

“Don’t worry, they’ll sleep soon,” I whispered, soothing my youngest sister who sniffled into my parka ruff. Aata and Aana always slept like the dead after their drunken fights.

Two hours later, I woke my sisters. “Let’s go in. It’s safe now.”