AUTUMN RAIN

01 | goodbye

DOMINIQUE

Apocalypse - Cigarettes After Sex

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was about four, five or six? I don't know. My dad, Kyle Knight, and my mother, Yekaterina Knight, and me of course, were on a very normal family trip to Mauritius.

I was made to learn to surf, more like was forced to, by my dad. He'd hold my hands and make me stand, whilst floating on the ocean waves.

I almost felt I was gonna drown any second but my dad would pick me up in an instant and say, "Don't be scared of failures. If you fall down once, it's alright. But if you don't get up and give it another go, you've truly failed."

And he'd make me do that everyday while we were in Mauritius.

It was about nine past eight in the night, we were in our hotel room, mom was in the shower and my dad was making me learn ABCs or something.

He never wasted any time and whenever we were toegther, he would always have me learn one thing or another.

Even as a hardly 6 year old, I noticed something unusual was going on in the closet, it'd make screeching noises now and then. My dad exactly knew what that was about and so he took all the precautions immidiately.

All the events that took place next are quite hazy. A guy bursted out of the closet with a gun in his hand and my dad pulled out his gun without any second thought, as if it was a reflex action.

All I remember was that the bullet from my dad's gun went straight between his eyes. His body dropped on the floor and soon there was a pool of blood, as I stared in disbelief.

I was just learning 'A is for apple' and then the very next second there was a dead man 1 feet away from me.

My mom came running from the shower, her cheeks as red as a tomato, with her silver eyes that I inherited, filled with worry & tears flowing uncontrollably.

"Kyle! I told you she shouldn't be exposed to all of this at such a young age!"

"What did you expect me to do Katerina? If I hadn't done shot this fucker down, he could've attacked our baby!" My dad ties his dark black hairs which reached just above his shoulders, in a manbun and he picks the body up like it weighs nothing.

"I told you we shouldn't have came here! Name one, one single trip where either someone didn't attack us or we didn't end up shooting someone dead! We chose this life, no we made this life. We're the mafia Kyle, life isn't and will never be normal for us. So stop trying to pretend we could live like a normal happy family because we both know we can't!"

On that day itself, I knew my life would never be your usual definition of normal.

Counting from that day upto today, I've seen endless amount of people begging my parents for their life to be spared and ending up getting killed.

A part of me was desensitized to all of it by then, but another part of me cried. Cried when every single person had their right to live their life being taken away like it was worth nothing.

I grew up in an unknown part of California, USA. I was home-schooled, therefore didn't have any friends or any people around my age, wasn't allowed to have social media, but I did anyway with a fake name. Rain. Rain Madison.