“Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love so greatly, and go to the land of Moriah, and there on a mountain that I will show you, offer him for a burnt-offering to me."

There are stories we all grow up knowing. Things we’re told as children, sitting at our mother’s knees. Usually they involve some foreign land with palaces and knights. Other times, they’re straight out of a Holy Book. A biblical stamp, etched into each of

us. No matter whom you are or what religion you practice, the chances are great that there is a story similar to that of Abraham and Isaac told to you at that young age. You remember this one in particular because it is more gruesome than most your mother will

ever tell you.

What kind of father is willing to murder his son, anyway?

At this very moment, typing this for anyone who dares to read my account, I am twenty-two years old. Obviously, I was told this same story as a child or I would not be relaying the memoir to you. However, there is something different in my account than that of anyone I have ever heard. My father was obsessed with the story and I’m not using obsessed lightly. Obsessed in a Johannes de Silentio kind of way. He retold the story over and over again, reveling in the blind faith Abraham had for a being he could not even touch. And yet, my father shared such devotion to the point that at my

birth, his first born son, he bestowed upon me the name Isaac. My mother would later shorten it to Zac, for my sake, I suppose.

And so this story always had some sort of meaning to me that surpassed its meaning for most other children. This was not just a story. This was something to live life according to. This was a faith I had to share or I would have been sentenced to the same kind of hell and damnation that Cain will suffer for eternity. I never questioned it. Or at least, I don’t remember questioning it until much later. I just did as I was told, the same as most little boys my age. I went to church, I said my prayers, and I read the

passages my father told me to read.

But faith, as we all know, is constantly tested. My first test came to me at the tender age of four and though I did not realize it then, it was something that would rip me up later. My mother gave birth to my sister, Rebecca. I always thought naming her that was somewhat bizarre as Rebecca would later become Isaac’s wife, not his sister. I could not and still cannot imagine what my father was thinking then but I suppose he was just sticking to his story. But her name is not what is important about her birth. What is important is that my mother died. There is the first difference in my story telling years. I was never told by my mother, in the tender way mothers have, about these stories. Nothing was ever softened. I learned exactly what the story said. This man, somewhere in ancient Israel, had taken his son up a mountain and tied him to a rock and had tried to kill him without ever questioning the reason.

I suppose that my father went downhill after my mother died. His only anchor became his faith and he went through a string of failed jobs, barely keeping us under a roof. My sister and I were on our own for a majority of the time and for me, that was fine. I spent weekends with my dad sometimes, fishing or camping and often Rebecca

tagged along. It was a functioning family unit for a majority of my life. My father and I were close. Or at least, I would consider us close. I ignored his issues and patched them up the best I could.

That was until I turned fourteen. At that point, things seemed to turn for the worse. I found myself being told to read more of the Bible to the point that I had no time to do anything else. My father would mutter under his breath and he started forcing my

sister to wear dresses, confiscating any sort of “male oriented” clothing she owned. We argued but not to the point that it escalated to anything physical. I was obedient to a fault. It was something I had been taught. There was, however, a very protective

and aggressive streak in me that my father often pointed out.

I remember the night it became the worst like it happened just moments ago. It was early November and Rebecca was already in bed. I was up late, typing a paper I had due for English class the next day. I had placed high at school and was therefore enduring a heavier course load than was normal. I was writing some kind of

analysis on Oedipus Rex. I heard the door open behind me, slowly and my immediate thought was that it was Rebecca. She often found herself in my room if she couldn’t sleep, sprawled out on my bed with headphones on while I worked. “Hey Beck,” I said without turning around. There was no answer and creaking spring. That was odd and so I made a motion to turn around but before my hands even hit the desk to create the propulsion to spin the chair, I felt something.

That something happened to be a rope and that rope was quickly tightened around my throat. The instinctual reaction was to fight. My hands rose too slowly and the rope had tightened, dragging me backward off my chair. I hit the floor hard and my vision was swimming, my lungs burning, my nails digging into the flesh around the rope so that I felt them start to slip in blood.

And then I saw my father’s face. He was dragging me, kicking and fighting out of my room and he kept saying over and over again, “I’m so sorry, Isaac.” I wondered, like an idiot, why he was sorry. I just wanted him to let go of me and explain what was going on. There had to be a reason.

We made it through the kitchen without causing much noise, which still surprises me. He opened the back screen door and tossed me. I went stumbling down the stairs and landed hard in the grass. I tore the rope away from my throat, gasping and choking to the point that I found myself throwing up as I tried to get to my feet. I had no time to catch my breath before he had his arms around my torso in some sort of vice grip. I kicked at him, shrugging viciously at his arms. My lungs were heaving, still barely able to draw breath and he threw me down over the stump of a tree we had cut down the year before. “What are you doing?” I finally managed the words, forcing them up through my mouth, through heaving oxygen and bile.

“What should have been done thousands of years ago,” he muttered. “What God wants.”

He had grabbed me wrists and though I tugged at him, my father was a big man. I had no chance against his grip as he knotted the rope around my hands and then looped it around the log, anchoring it on a root that stuck up out of the ground. “What are you talking about?” I breathed, moving as far from him as the ropes would allow. “I don’t understand.”

“Isaac.”

And it hit me then. Oh. My. God. My heart skipped a beat and I began to hyperventilate. It was an instant panic attack from hell. He was going to kill me. I had known for some time that his obsession was not normal but I tolerated it. My mind went into overdrive and I began to pull at the rope with all the muscle I had. “No!” I found myself begging him, trying to avoid his hands when he reached for me to put my face against the cold, damp wood. I don’t know why I didn’t scream. Maybe I expected him to stop but all I did was whisper the pleas and when he finally managed to get me pressed against the wood, I couldn’t beg anymore. The tears had filled my throat so completely that it was useless to open my mouth. So this was dying.

I saw the flash of silver leave his belt and my arms gave one last involuntary jerk toward my chest to pull the rope but it didn’t give me any leeway. It only remained there, rooted to the ground. “Please…dad…don’t…” I felt my lips form the words but no noise was produced but the sound of the screen door opening behind us and Rebecca’s blood curdling scream before the metal hit me.

I felt it sink. I actually felt it slice through muscle like a knife through butter and at first, there was no pain. Only the warm, sticky feeling of blood running down my back and soaking my shirt and the sound of Rebecca’s scream. The neighbors’ lights were flicking on and across the town, dogs were barking. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was the texture of cold, wet wood beneath my cheeks and the tears on my face.

And then the pain. It knocked my breath out and for a long moment it seemed like I was absorbing Rebecca’s scream and then it echoed from my own chest in a long, anguished, tortured shriek. My father was lifting the knife again and my muscles were so shocked and frozen that I knew I couldn’t move even if I tried. My fists were balled up and my sister was still screaming. “Isaac!”

Someone next door had vaulted over the fence and was running at my father. I knew the man’s name but at that moment it didn’t register. I only knew that he hit my abuser full force in the back and knocked him to the ground. The knife flew from his hand and landed somewhere in the yard.

Rebecca was tearing across the grass, her little legs like pale white sticks beneath her nightgown. She landed beside me, sobbing and ripping at the ropes that held me to the wood. Her tiny fingers, numb with cold, worked the knots loose and she pulled the ropes free of my hands. I could not support my body weight with the decreasing blood and in the distance, I saw flashing red lights and heard sirens wailing up the streets. Rebecca pushed herself up underneath me, rubbing my arms, trying to keep some of my body heat in me.

My father was frantic, shrieking and begging to be allowed to finish what had been started but the man, my rescuer, held him back. He restrained him against the fence as Rebecca fought to keep me from freezing in the November winds. He held him still as the medics lifted me onto a stretcher and carted me off to an ambulance.

The last memory I have of that night is watching them put him in the back of a cruiser. His rights were being read to him and Rebecca was holding the hand of another cop, who was speaking to a social worker already. The EMTs were busy snaking tubes into my arms and pressing bandages into the wound on my back. My mind, at that point was detached from the trauma of the body and the drugs they fed into my veins were enough to make my vision blur and blacken.

I remember the top of the ambulance and the muffled voices of the men working on me and the woman that was driving. “That poor boy,” one of them said softly.

“God told him to,” the other scoffed, pushing a needle into my back where the wound was. “Can you tell me your name kid?”

I blinked and my lips parted, my throat ripped raw from screaming and I managed a hoarse answer. “Isaac Marshall.”

“Isaac?” he asked, incredulous. “Well isn’t that the icing on the cake.”

And then I was sleeping.