Our Flame

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italicized paragraphs= flashback
NADIA

"Mama you're my favorite person besides Niko, Luka, Viktor,..." My mother smiles at me while I continue to list off all my brothers.

I stop and frown when I notice the bruising under her eye. Five year old me reaches out to touch her eye. "Hurt."

She shakes her head as if it's nothing, "The world isn't always kind, маленький." (little one)

I tilt my head, not understanding. "Papa and brothers can protect us from the rude and bad." I remind her.
Mama gives me a soft smile.

"Sometimes the bad is disguised as the good."

"What does that mean?" She shakes her head. "I hope you never have to find out, Nadia."

I smile sadly as I remember the moment with my mother. Then and now, she'll always be the strongest women I had the chance of knowing.

She was strong enough to never let my brothers and I see her at her worst, even when she had every reason to.

I can only hope to see her again one day, to be half the person she once was.

"Nadia, I'm sorry. Open the door." My father pleads from outside my room door.

It's what he does; he gets drunk, blames all his problems on me, tells me how worthless I am, then proceeds to scream about how I ruined his life and our family.

But he ruined it, just like everything else. In two days he'll feel guilty about it and tell me it'll never happen again. Yet, it always happens again.

It's a cycle, one that I despise.

I swing open the door pushing him out of my way, he looks at me. "You don't have to go to school today, I want to talk to you. Just you and me." I scoff while heading towards the stairs.

I hate him.

"You're such a shitty person, you know that."

He says something in response but I continue to walk causing him to sigh in annoyance. "Nadia, stop acting like a child."

"I am a fucking child." I yell back, I'm actually an adolescent.

I wince as he grabs both my wrists stopping me from moving. I look into his eyes, "You're hurting me."

"I'm sorry." He mumbles. "You said that last time, remember?" I remind.

My father does not care, he's cruel and unstable. His apologies will always mean nothing to me.

Now, he wants something from me. That's the only reason he'd ever want to talk. That's the only reason why he isn't hitting me right now.

I rush out of the house, leaving him with whatever he wanted to say. I make sure he's not coming out of the door then I start my walk to school.

Growing up, I watched my father abuse my mother. He disguised it as love and always told us it was nothing.

Slowly I realized just how bad it was. My mother, who once loved to dance and laugh stopped coming out of her room- she stopped everything.

Soon enough I saw being in my father's presence the same way as my mother once did, dreadful.

I was young but I wasn't excused from my father's hatred, he screwed up my life along with everything else in his path.