Paranoiac

CHAPTER 11

The gut-wrenching scream seemed to rip at my insides, clawing like a hungry animal at the slight sense of normalcy I had managed to gain over the past few years. The high-pitched, blood curdling sound rung inside my head and all throughout my body. It was a scream so horrible, so genuinely terrifying that I had locked it away. Just one of the many things that I had stored in that chest of memories, one that i swore never to reopen. That single heart shattering scream was now tearing that chest to pieces as my memories came flooding back. The sheer emotional weight of it was pressing down on me, more and more every second as I blindly groped my surroundings, trying to find the stairs. My legs failed me and my frail knees buckled as I fell limply to the ground. I refused to open my eyes. I saw this once, and look what it did to me! My breathing was heavy as I lay, curled into the fetal position as the scene before me played out. No, no, no! This couldn't be happening! I hadn't even thought about what happened that day in over 13 years. My mind refused to let me, and it was probably better that way. Now I had no choice. It was happening, right here, exactly the way it happened that day when I was 9 years old. I didn't have to see it again to know what had happened. I didn't have to see the blood to know it was there. I didn't have to see my deranged looking mother looming over the mutilated body of my father to know she was there. But she was. And the blood stained knife was at her side as she grinned down at her work. A look on her face of disappointment. As if it didn't turn out quite as she'd hoped it would. And then the look in her eyes as she shifted her gaze ever so slightly to look into that of her screaming daughters. There was no murderous intent, no malicious implications. Just the inquisitive concern of a mother, about to ask her daughter how she had scraped her knee. The terror in the flustered questions pouring out of the little girls mouth. "Mama! Mama what did you do?! What happened to Daddy?!" As her wide eyes flickered from her mothers face, to the red knife still gripped nonchalantly in her hands, to the lifeless body of her father. By this point, I knew, the maid had shuffled up the stairs, and after her own serenade of screams had grabbed the child gruffly and held her to her chest, tying to stifle the sobs racking her small body, as if afraid that the sound would send her mother into a murderous rampage. Again. The portly woman backed up slowly, gripping the handrail as she rushed down the steps with the hysterical child in her arms. I didn't have to look to see it. It was all there. In my  mind. Forever etched into my memory. And I knew, that this time, there was no hiding it.