Red skies

It’s another day where father hit mother and this time, he told me to watch like I was next like he was telling me my death wish. I thought this month was like any other month, but it was never like this before. It was time for the daily beating where he hit me for the 100th time and some-how I’m immune to it, his slaps against my rough skin but it’s constantly is being painted purple like blueberries and my fingernails are chipped with me trying to protect myself from the monster in my house. He sits on his high horse with flames through his eyes. It’s the devil incarnation who drugs me to fall asleep and wishes me sweet nightmares at night as he grants them with a sticky kiss on my forehead. I woke up with a numb feeling in my feet; it was mother cuddle up in a ball at the edge of my bed with a black eye and this time the colour is too rich to hide with makeup.

Their argument started with background noise but then the screams tagged along shortly after. 7 days later father came in spent. He smelt like beer from the moment our front door swung open; me and mother looked at each other knowing our father was drunk again trying to prepare ourselves for the might ahead. We tried to hide but mother was too big to fit in the small corners and cupboards, so she hid me first, she hid me where she thought I wouldn’t be found. She stuffed me in the corner of my closet as fast as she could then she grabbed her favourite blanket to cover me. Father called out to me, screaming my name, saying to come downstairs to talk but we heard father grab his baseball bat like it was his crown and drag it against the stairs to make us aware he was coming up, so mother moved faster gathering everything she could to cover me. She got up and ran as fast as she could and stuffed her sweet body underneath my bed but my bed was too small for her to hide. Through the gap between the blanket and all the clothes, I saw his feet gather at the end of my bed where mother’s head was, his feet shuffled a little closer allowing the tips of his shoes to touch her hair. Ever so slowly he bent down to take a peek. Boo, he yelled, clasping her neck to drag her out while she screamed. my soul jumped to the sound of a loud thud against the other side of my closet wall and I so badly wanted to go out and run, to see if mother was okay this time, to see if she saved us but by the scream, before the thud, I knew father was the winner because mother screams didn’t echo through our house anymore. He controlled where she went and listened to the smack of her body against the stairs accompanied by the final thud. Everything remained silent with not a sound or a scream to follow.

Staggering up the stairs and I heard him smell the air like a dog looking for its next meal. He stomped his feet towards my room and opened the door so slowly it creaked. He turned my room upside down looking for me but mother hid me well, so it took him some time to realise that there was only one spot in my room left, the closet. He stared at it with a toxic grin then I saw his silhouette come closer and closer and he decided to stand there for a minute until he reached for the handle, he slowly opened it which led me to shake, he then saw the blanket sway and automatically persuaded himself that it was me under the blanket, so he lifted it to reveal me huddled up in the corner. He grabbed me and dragged my body down the stairs like he had done this all before. Oh wait, he did with my mother and his mother too. He threw me into the corner and cuffed my tiny wrist to the heater where mother was out cold hanging from the ceiling like the new centrepiece; with a baseball bat, with C. A engraved on the handle, beside me in which he beat her. her head with her blood splattered across our off-white walls and her blood; dying the carpet like the day when father smashed her wine glass on our white carpet.

He told me not to scream because our neighbours would hear it but I was determined to make sure mother was still awake. I bellowed at the top of my lungs “mother wake up, don’t be dead, I need you, I need you,” but I did not obey his orders so he slapped my cheek so hard my whole body turned towards him. I was punished with hot oil from the stove where my mum was cooking before my father came home, he picked up the hot pan with his bare hands like some-how he could not feel the burning sensation; he walked towards me and grabbed my left arm and little by little he started to pour, with achievement in his eyes. I screamed in agony and this was torture but he grabbed my chin so roughly and spun my face to looked at him, he smiled and wiped the tears off my face then said, “Stop screaming, doesn’t it feel so pleasurable your skin melting away? Don’t be such a kid” He chuckled “grow up”. He made it seem normal, like it was funny; like these thoughts were engraved into his head waiting for the moment where he could just snap. I couldn’t run and my skin was bubbling and throbbing but he was so pleased with himself and decided to stand up and look at me with a smile knowing the fear has grown within me, that the fear was in control of my unprotected body; he was so happy, he could see the fear in my coal-like eyes while they sparkled in the reflection on the swinging lightbulb; that he kept on hitting since the lightbulb was able to swing so far to keep hitting my mother’s dead face, again and again, and again. He wanted me to watch him do those disgusting things to my mother.

My pulsating chest with my heart beating so fast you could hear it, made his power thrive. Something possessed him that night, I don’t know what happened before he came home, all I know is that mother was dead and I feared for my life; what if I was next.