Shattered (#1 in Shifting Series)

Cursed

Sarah Klein felt utterly empty as she sat in her recliner after talking with Melissa then Misti.  Her mind went back to the conversation she had with her mother just before she had heard the voice and then her friends calling her.  She had always been close with her mother, which was why she had known that she was not doing as well as she tried to display on the phone.  Her mother was right, she was strong.  Too strong in fact.  She had learned to be strong.  Her life had never been a bed of daisies.  From the time she was a child, she had to fight to survive.

Her mother had been married for years to a violent sociopath.  There were memories still buried deep in her brain of the most severe beatings her mother had taken.  Her beautiful face marred and distorted to an almost unrecognizable state.  Sarah would hide when the beating took place, always scared that she was next as she and her stepfather had never seen eye to eye.  When she was a teenager, he then started to beat her as well.  Nothing that was visible, he was always careful to leave marks that were hidden beneath clothing.  The terror of those years was permanently burned into her psyche. 

Some girls that grew up in those conditions became extremely promiscuous, bouncing from bed to bed following the pattern of abusive relationships as their mothers.  Or like her best friend, Melissa, found men that had the same kind of temperament as their childhood abusers.  It didn't seem to matter who she hooked up with, she always managed to find the most narcissistic asshole in the pack.  Sarah, however, had gone a different path.  She had avoided men like the plague, refusing to be trapped in the kind of relationship her mother had been enslaved by all those long years.  They had finally escaped but she was almost an adult by then.  She had then found a good man, even having another child - her younger brother Reno.  Life was not kind, though.  He had ended up dying from cancer when Reno was just a child and Sarah had helped raise him.

Sarah had not escaped completely unscathed, though, by the trauma's she had endured as a child prior to their escape.  She had been a heavy drinker and smoker through most of High School and College. One night after narrowly avoiding being raped, she had given up drinking and smoking.  Instead, she channeled her anger and trauma into self-defense and taken up Aikido.  The philosophy of Aikido had been just what she had needed at that time in life.  She had found some balance in life, and it was at the Dojo that she had met her husband, Ben.

If it had not been for Ben, she would never have trusted men ever.  He had been so different and had applied the philosophy of Aikido to his entire life. Aikido's primary belief is the way of harmonious spirit. The goal in the practice of aikido is to overcome oneself instead of cultivating violence or aggressiveness. Ben had healed her in so many ways.  He had been a gentle soul and had filled the broken pieces of herself with love.  It had taken him some time to break through her walls - not to mention a few hard take downs on the mat when she had gotten aggravated at his persistence - but once he had done so, they were married shortly after.  Their daughter, Demiana, was born a year later.

She closed her eyes as the memory of that night triggered in her brain. She should have known it was coming, anytime she spoke to her mother she was triggered.  She was not sure why talking to her mother did it, but it always did.  Perhaps it was because her pain had been almost as great as her own at the death of her grandchild and son-in-law.  It didn't matter that she had spoken to her friends in the interim, the trigger was still there waiting for when she was alone and in silence.

The sound of metal twisting, glass shattering reverberated in Sarah's mind as she was dragged back to that awful moment in time. A sonic boom rolled again and again in her mind.  They had been laughing only a little while before all hell broke loose.  It was no one's fault, she had no one to blame.  It was an accident on a slick road, a twist of fate.  For those brief five years, she had been happy and at peace with her little family.