ALEA IACTA EST ; GRACE

000.

PHILOMENA YILDIRIM, at this time only eleven years old, had just come home from school. A happy smile on her face as she was sure to get some praise from her mother for having received a good mark in math ( which was something to be celebrated, she was terrible in math).

With her key still in the keyhole and her hand on the door handle, the little girl looked into the unusually silent apartment. Were it any normal day she would have already heard some kind of noise, if it were only her baby cousin's senseless babbling or her mother watching yet another Turkish TV show.

However, on this very day, there was no sound; only the heavy silence that came with destruction and death.

Not truly having grasped the situation, the girl made her way inside, first calling out her mother's, then her aunt's and lastly even her cousin's name. The only answer she received was silence and as she listened, her chest began to ache with this feeling you get when nothing is going as it should, when you hope that everything will be alright, but deep down know, nothing will be alright ever again.

Her little hands, with their chapped pink nail polish trembled as she set down her equally pink backpack in the middle of the floor ― in the back of her head she could hear her mother chastising her for being messy.

She walked around the small apartment. First she checked all the bathrooms, they looked as normal as they always did. Then she went to the two bedrooms they had, here too everything was unchanged from when she had left in the morning for school.

Why did everything seem so normal? Why was nothing out of the ordinary? Still, there was something completely wrong, Philomena could sense it.

Finally she reached the kitchen / living room area that was considerably too small for the four people living there, with the furniture pressed to the walls so that they could comfortably fit together on the couch and play board games on the small coffee table.

Right away, Philomena noticed the many things that were out of the ordinary. She rubbed her (still trembling) hands over her eyes as she looked over the small room.

This couldn't be. How could this be? The color red was everywhere.

The furniture was partially crushed and its wooden material spread on the floor. For some reason even the wall-high window was destroyed and the shards glinted in the afternoon sun, adding a bizarre and disgusting kind of beauty to the whole scene.

As Philomena avoided looking down at the dismembered bodies of her family, the only people who had ever loved her, the only thing she could concentrate on was the color red that surrounded her, the shining of the sun and how the glass glinted in the afternoon sun. How could a scene so terrifying be connected to such beauty?

The girl looked one last time over the whole scene, not once looking at the pale faces of her loved ones and did the only thing she could think of.

Run.

Now she would forever be able to remember her family as they were, with smiles on their faces and light in their eyes, she did not know what they looked like in their last moments and in their death.

Philomena didn't even know if she wanted to see them, she would forever be content with the happy memories she connected with her family, not this strange beauty she had discovered on the day that had changed her life forever.

"Horrifying news, Birmingham is reeling from the discovery of a dismembered family-two middle-aged women and a baby. Compounding the tragedy, a little brown-haired, red-eyed girl, by the name Philomena Yıldırım, is now missing. As the girl's teachers reported she wore a pink, frilly dress on that day and two pigtails. The community is on edge as authorities launch a desperate search for the child, urging residents to report any information. Stay tuned for updates on this heartbreaking story. Now let's continue with the weather ―"