How did your parents completely mess you up?

The Poison of Gravity

How did your parents completely mess you up? My parents hung metal bars across our bedroom ceilings when I was nine and made us wrap our legs around them to sleep upside down like bats because they believed gravity was poisoning our brains.

Mom and dad had joined this group that taught gravity pulled toxins into your skull while you slept normally.

The leader said humans were meant to hang like our ancestors who lived in trees. They came home from the first meeting with construction equipment and spent all night installing bars strong enough to hold our weight. Dad tested each one by hanging from it himself, timing how long before his face turned purple.

The first night was torture. They showed us how to hook our knees over the bars and cross our ankles for security. My little brother cried until he threw up, which looked terrifying coming out upside down.

Mom just cleaned it up and rehung him. She said our bodies needed time to remember their natural position. Blood rushed to my head until I thought my eyes would explode. But they padlocked our door and removed the regular bed, so we had no choice.

After a week, we learned to sleep in short bursts before the headaches got too bad. Then mom decided we weren’t hanging long enough. She installed timer locks on our knee hooks that wouldn’t release for 8 hours. If we needed the bathroom, too bad. She gave us adult diapers and said our ancestors didn’t climb down from trees for every little thing.

My sister developed constant nose bleeds from the pressure. But dad said that was just toxins leaving her brain. School was impossible when we kept falling asleep at our desks from exhaustion. The nurse called home about the rope burns on our legs and the burst blood vessels in our eyes.

Mom withdrew us for homeschooling, saying traditional education was poisoning us with right side up thinking. She hung bars in every room so we could practice proper positioning all day. Even meals happened upside down with special straws and tubes so we could eat without choking.

I tried sleeping on the floor one night, but dad had installed motion sensors. Alarms screamed until they found me and rehung me with zip ties instead of the timer locks as punishment. The ties cut off circulation and my feet turned blue. They only cut me down when I started convulsing.

Mom said I was having a gravity detox seizure and hung me right back up with looser ties. My brother figured out he could unhook one leg at a time and rotate to prevent the worst pain, but mom caught him and decided he needed stronger treatment.

She ordered special boots that locked onto the bars and couldn’t be removed without a key. The boots were so heavy they stretched our knee joints backwards. He screamed for hours until his voice gave out. Then they got boots for all of us.

The group leader visited to check our progress and said we weren’t inverting young enough. He had a newborn daughter who’d been hanging since birth and never experienced gravity poisoning. Mom got pregnant immediately just to prove she could raise a properly inverted baby.

She hung upside down her entire pregnancy. When my new sister was born, they hung a tiny bar in her crib with special harnesses. She never learned to crawl normally, just swung bar to bar like they wanted.

Then I found dad’s laptop open to the group’s private forum. The leader was selling our progress photos to medical fetish sites. Hundreds of pictures of us hanging unconscious, bleeding, crying. Members paid extra for video of our detox seizures. The leader used the money to build a compound where families could live fully inverted.

Dad had already put down a deposit. I printed everything and hid it inside my gravity boot. But before I could use it, mom announced we were moving to the compound next week. She’d sold our house to prove commitment.

The new place had no regular floors, just bars at different heights. Bathrooms were holes in the ceiling. Kitchen appliances hung upside down. She showed us proudly like it was paradise.

That night, I cut through my bootstraps with a stolen knife. My legs were so deformed I couldn’t stand normally, but I crawled to my sister’s room. She was only six, but helped me cut the others free. We made it to the front door before dad heard us.

He came swinging across the ceiling bars like some nightmare acrobat, faster than we could crawl with our ruined legs. He grabbed my brother first, re-hanging him by his ankles with rope. Then my older sister, using zip ties so tight she couldn’t scream.

My baby sister tried to swing away on her little arms, but mom caught her and locked her into a special full body harness. I made it outside, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I dragged myself across the lawn toward the street, leaving blood trails from where the boots had rubbed my skin raw.

Then I heard mom laughing behind me. Sweetheart, you can’t even walk anymore. Your body knows where it belongs.

I looked back to see her and Dad standing normally, casually, like their legs worked fine, like they’d never hung upside down at all. Dad picked me up easily and carried me back inside.

As he locked my new boots onto the bar, tighter than ever before, Mom said, “The leader’s doctors are coming tomorrow to make the inversion permanent. Just a small surgery on your inner ear, so you’ll never want to be right side up again.”

She left the room and her footsteps went down the hall while I hung there, testing how much these new boots would let me move. The metal bar creaked when I shifted my weight, but it held solid. These weren’t the cheap ones from before that we could sometimes wiggle out of.

These were thick industrial things with locks that looked like they came from a real medical supply company. My little brother was whimpering through the wall between our rooms, and I tried to call out to tell him it would be okay.

But my voice came out as this broken croak because my throat was still wrecked from all the screaming during our escape attempt. Even trying to make words hurt, and all I could manage was this rough whisper that he probably couldn’t hear.

The house got quiet, except for mom and dad talking downstairs about tomorrow’s big day, and how proud the leader would be. Hours passed with blood pounding in my ears and my vision getting darker around the edges from hanging so long.

Then around midnight, when everything was still, I felt something weird against my ankle inside the boot. My fingers could barely reach down far enough, but I managed to grab what felt like a small piece of paper. It was a business card.

When I twisted it toward the moonlight from the window, I could make out writing on the back. Call if you need help. And a phone number underneath.

The younger assistant from earlier must have stuck it in there when they were checking the boots. I couldn’t write the number down anywhere, so I started repeating it over and over in my head. Seven digits became the only thing I could think about while I hung there.

555 4321 555 4321. I said it hundreds of times until it was burned into my brain even as my vision kept going dark.