Family?Home?

2

After a tedious day of school, you and your brother were driven home by your neighbor, whose children happened to go to the same school as you both do. But even before you even got close to your house, you saw a trail of white floating from your driveway and into the skies, dancing to the song of the wind.

You and your brother exchanged looks. There was no reason to start a fire, unless it was a barbecue.

Though you both knew better than that.

After getting out of the car and assuring the aunty that everything was fine, she drove off and you opened the wooden gate with a press of a button of your key.

The gates opened eerily, revealing a nightmare from the ancient times.

Books. Stacks of books, piles of books. Books that you and your brother had spent years buying, reading and rereading, collecting, were slowly being fed to a fire that grew in size and appetite as it ate. Classics, horror, sci-fi, historical, all of it. They were helpless victims that curled and blackened against the maw of the flame.

And at the edge of the pile of ash, showed evidence of the tiny stack of paper that kindled the entrance of oblivion.

Papers with your handwriting on it.

Sixty pages, to be exact.

You were vaguely aware of you falling to your knees, unable to speak; vaguely aware of your brother falling on all fours, shocked and traumatized; you were vaguely aware of your father, who ignored you two, and kept on tossing book after book into the heat and floating dust.

Only fragments of what happened next remained in your mind.

You remember lunging for your father, hands on his throat. You tossed and kicked and head-butted, ramming him into walls and cars and door. You stopped only when your father was still, unable to move. With a defiant roar, you charged up the stairs, heading for him room.

Along the way, Mother tried to stop you. She had seen everything through the window. You screamed at her and hit her, sending her tumbling down the stairs.

Still her broken form didn't break the monster in you. You kept going up.

Finally, you charged into your parents' room. You tore, smashed, stomped, split, bit, dismantled all the devices that belonged to him. Every single one, from the laptop that held all his work, to his antique Nokia that he lent to you once in a while to keep contact. All the while one thought kept going around your head. How do you like it now? How do you like it now?

How do you like it now when all your precious are gone?

You may have said it out loud.

Eventually, you lost your strength, your rage, and your consciousness.

But the fragments you failed to recall were just as devastating.

Bent grills, torn metal, splintered wood, shattered concrete...they marked a path of a rampant beast, your path of destruction. Yet you were barely aware of them, like the pain in your fists, the strain in your muscles, the soreness in your jaw had barely mattered, or even felt. What mattered then was breaking your father utterly.

Before you were lost in darkness, the last thing you thought was:

"I am finally free."