The Fear I've known

Crash! My head flies up from the pillow where I’ve been sleeping. “Mom?” I ask tentatively, not knowing what to expect to hear. There is no answer, so I go to her room and knock on her door. No answer. That’s when I hear another noise. This time it’s not the sound of breaking glass, but of sliding drawers.

I quietly enter my parents’ bedroom and shake them awake. “Wha---, what’s going on?” my father says groggily. “There’s someone downstairs” I say, an obvious note of fear in my voice that both of my parents pick up immediately. Father gets out of bed and grabs the pistol out of his drawer. “Stay here. I’m going to check it out.” He pads quietly down the hallway, and as he slides into the shadows and out of view, the only thing that I can hear is my own heart pounding wildly, as if to break free of my chest.

                What feels like hours go by, and then we hear a noise. Then there is a thud and the sound of two men wrestling each other, then another thud. Silence ensues for another millennia as we wait for something else to happen. As I begin to relax, I hear a gunshot, loud and crisp in the early morning. Both mother and I wince and she lets out a small cry. We wait, and continue waiting until we hear the thud of feet coming up the stairs.

                “Richard?” mother says quietly. “Richard, is that you?” She pokes her head around the corner. I do the same, and we both see the silhouette of a man coming up the stairs. “O my god, Rick, don’t scare me like that.”

And in a gravelly voice we both hear, “Who’s Rick?” Then the figure pulls his gun level with my mothers’ head, and another gun report follows. I scream as my mother falls to the floor, a limp rag doll, blood pooling around her head and soaking into her nightgown. The figure looks right at me, and as he turns the gun to face me, I duck into my parents’ room and hide. He follows me into the room and begins to search for me.

I begin to pray that he won’t find me. Then I heard a noise that, under normal circumstances might make me afraid, made me feel hope. It was the squall of sirens, progressively getting louder. The man swore and ran off, and again I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I crawled out from beneath the bed and stared at my late mother. She looked so peaceful, her face unmarred by expression. The only flaw was the blood that had soaked through every fiber in the carpet surrounding her head and upper chest.

And as the police entered my house and began the search, I walked in an almost dreamlike state, not believing anything that I was seeing. Then reality hit, and I was struck with the millions of thoughts that couldn’t be stopped.  Mother cant be dead no way could she possibly have died. Then an afterthought, what happened to father is he dead too?  I ran downstairs and nearly ran into an officer as he was coming around the corner. “Whoa there son.” 

“Where is my dad? I want to see my father.”  And as I finished the sentence, the black bag that means someone else has died. “Wait!!” I yell at the men carrying the bag.

“Someone stop that kid.”

But nobody could.  I was determined to see my father one last time. I ran to the bag and ripped the zipper open and looked where my fathers’ face had been. It was no longer the face that I had known from birth. It was now a bloody and mutilated mess that could never be fixed. And as I stared at him, I felt myself falling down a hole that never stopped. Then my world went black. When I finally came to, I was in a white room with all sorts of fancy equipment that I couldn't have named if I had made it. A doctor entered the room, and I could tell by the look on his face that I had been out for quite awhile.

"Finally awake, are we?"

"Where am I?" I questioned him groggily, not quite awake yet, my head throbbing. Then an even more pressing question entered my mind. "Where are my parents?" I was already dreading the answer, but letting it go unanswered would only prolong my unearthly unease.

"They're dead, son. There was nothing we could do about it. We all tried our hardest," but I knew that he was lying. They couldn't have saved them even if they had wanted to. I hung my head and began to cry, heaving sobs that seemed to shake my entire body to the core of my being.

They were gone.