Empty: Book 2

29 : Empty Grave

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this story are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Content Warning: TORTURE/ CHILD ABUSE

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March 5, 1978

As innocence is one thing that keeps wrong and rightness far away from each other's verdict, falling out of it is like a child who has just grown older, but weaker— a thought you can compare with this rough pack of wind sweeping against the snow with less passion as the night goes heavier by the flakes, seeping into every home so peaceful yet so pale. Hard to tell if someone has been living in this little land one might call a village of bleak; if not for the six-year-old girl sneaking out the window of their house committing her mini crime, walking in her bare little feet while occasionally sprinting across the empty road in the protection of her heavy coat. A tumbler in her hand; a square pillow inside her embrace.

Familiar to her eyes is how the abandoned school bus lingered in her view, parked on the terrain accompanied by a grave of dirt neglected by the community's obligation. She waves her hand up her head— a signal for the old man in the driver's seat where he was waiting lonely for the merry child's daily visit, where for some reason, he can't move. The roof, windows, and even the recognizable insides of the bus were already coated with freezing white that only the brightest day could wipe off.

"Here's Lockie! Got you a hot tea, and a pillow with a warm case!" she sang in a warm greeting and pure enthusiasm in her coming presence into someone she knew who's been patiently waiting."...I've been hugging it and squeezing for like an hour to keep it warm. But I don't think it still does? is it okay to you?" she added, raising her tone in cynical unsureness.

She hurried to the open window owned by the front seat to approach, beholding a lone man sitting with a pack of bandages all over his body covering his peeking chronic wounds with plenty on his face he has forever to endure. But the little girl gains a reason to slip her smile, perceiving the way he gazes as not a father who welcomes.

"Dad?" she called him in a surrounding of greedy flies circulating her air. She already has thought she can't refuse, denial in her breath stirring heavily as she places her hand over his stomach for the sense of his breath, where in a time of doom, her innocent views weren't been prepared as she discovered the brutal reality kept in the bus she shouldn't trust.

Dark blood, sprinkled snow. Her frosty purple lips crinkled and curved down, her whole face trembling in a solemn weeping to the loudest howl by the discovery of her father's dismembered limbs scattered at the bottom of the seat, festered by the festivity of large piggish rats hoarding the lifeless man's feet, no leftover even the nails but staying eaten as witnessed by his worrying kid.

She bravely enters the bus, chasing away the flocking rats as she picks up her father's mutilated arm from the floor to accept the truth. Diseased by regret, she places the tumbler in the broken hand's broken grip in a loving farewell of a child. In agonizing apology, she rested the pillow upon his stomach for the late warmth she must've earlier given before she left in a different shape of soul.

The same method of sneaking in, she jumps back into the window of her room in a burden eager to hide in grief, eager to be alone. Until she remembered, she still had a mother.

And that made everything worse.

A 28-year-old lady in hostile footsteps into her daughter's bed, nothing on her face and entire intention but a glare and glaring agitation. The little orbs of a child locked on her mother's with her little head shaking, drawing herself into the corner, begging to pass her just this day.