Little Angel

Ethan Triche

I cried, cradling my mother in my arms, as tears streamed down her face.
She wasn’t crying for her usual reason. No. This was an entirely different affair. On the television she just found out that her high school friend had been murdered. She was still in touch with most of her old friends. This was a small town. It was the tenth victim in as little as two months. All men. All stabbed repeatedly. All got their hands cut off.
I wanted to do something for her. She was always crying, for one reason, or The reason.
That’s when The reason lumbered in, drunk out of his mind, and grabbed my mother by her hair, dragged her across the room, and punched her in the already-bruised eye. He pushed me up against the wall, adding a decorative hole, one of many throughout the house.
I sat helpless in the fallen drywall. As he beat her. I sat helpless.


“Wake up, honey,” My mother said from the doorway to my room.
I had set my clock the night before, it hadn’t gone off. I was older now. My first day of high school. I could wake myself up, but it would take a little adjustment period.
“Thanks, mom,” I said. I always woke up easily. I didn’t want to be a burden on her, be another cause of trouble.
As I walked the hall to the bathroom, she stopped me. She looked down at me. Seeing her bruised face wasn’t setting a good tone for my first day. It was so ugly. Not her. She was beautiful, inside and out. The ugliness of the abuse made it hard to look at her. But it was reality. It was her reality. It was my reality. So, I looked her in her eye, the other swollen shut. “Be quiet as you get ready, honey. Daddy is still asleep.”
I nodded.


School was about a ten-minute walk. I had made the walk many times. This was my first day, but I knew the entire town. I played outside a lot. At the pond along the way I had been fishing before. In the winter I would walk on the ice. One winter I fell in but was able to pull myself back out because as I fell I grabbed a strong frozen weed along the edge. I sometimes wondered if it would all have been better if I hadn’t grabbed hold of that weed that day. If I had fallen below the ice, never to find my way back up.
When I got home, soaking wet and freezing, my father beat my ass. As he beat me, I wished that whoever took care of the grounds at the pond had taken a moment to do their fucking job and take out the weed-whacker.