I rip away boards that have held the door of my childhood home closed for too many years. A few scraps of wood and some rusty nails can’t keep the ghosts locked away. I stomp over used needles and past spray-painted profanity. Desiccated flies comb my hair from a thousand dangling webs. The battered La-Z-Boy where my mother drank sits beneath the leather strap my father cracked across my back to keep me down. I snap open my knife and add a notch to the wall where they measured me, one last mark to show them both that I survived.