- Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Just started this yesterday and I like where it's going so far. Please review.
I remember

Prologue

I remember. I remember everything. I remember the last days with the both of them. It was normally loud and messy, a blur of faded colors and screaming when I used to watched. I didn’t mind it actually, I grew to drown it out with loud music that blared into my head so loud I’d think my eardrums would burst any second. But there was one day, one beautiful day when it had just stormed that night and we went to the beach. The air was light and foam-capped waves rolled against the face of the sand. The sky was a brilliant clear blue and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I just walked down the beach with them; the moist sand squishing between my small toes.

I still remember that night. I knew that something was different. The house was strangely quiet and there was tension that hung in the air and spun around with the ceiling fan above the couch they always screamed near. They always found their way to the center of the house and screamed their lungs out. I think they sometimes I forgot I was there, that I was here, in the present. A living human being with a functioning heart and cerebral cortex. And that's when I would become numb. When someone would be hit by a thrown vase, or dad would shove mom across the room and she sit there pitiful and cry, I’d be happy because they didn’t care, and even then with my young comprehension, I understood I was nothing to them.

So when he strangled her there on the floor I just starred as the life left her body and she stopped twitching, moving, breathing. He just starred at her and looked at his hands in disbelief. He started crying and then he went into the office, his office where I wasn’t supposed to ever go into but I always did but I was curious. Curious that maybe I could find something in there that would make me beautiful to everyone, appealing. But nothing, no paintings, no pictures, no letters. Nothing.

He shot himself with his own 33mm pistol. He showed it to me when I was five, a year before he killed mom and then himself. It had been after dinner one night and he was talking half drunk and laughing as mom sat there at the table quiet eating stoically. He picked me up and took me into his office. Where he bragged at how he was a police officer, and how he never used this gun because it was his father’s personal one and when I was old enough, he’d pass it to me.

I remember. I remember everything. Every detail, every smell, even the resonant echo of the blast of the gun. I remember everything.