Between Ties

Prologue

Her hand felt like it was covered in oil as I had felt my eight year old fingers slip from its dainty, feminine form. Her fingernails were painted in a shiny crimson red, I had noticed them and knew in that moment that it was something I would always remember, a memory I would take with me through life.

Her voice, the only sound I could hear as she screamed in terror while tears rolled down her cheeks as they tried to take me from her, it's like I could feel her pain in my chest, an unexplainable form of my earliest feeling of torment. My body was being lifted into the air by a man in what had looked like a white spacesuit as the rest of them had held her back, pulling her as if she was a rag doll as she fought for me,

Her only son, her only family.

It felt like my whole world was crumbling apart in slow motion, like cookie crumbs falling down a dark pit of nothingness. I could see it all in seconds that moved like a floating feather in space. Her dark high-tied hair came crashing down like a waterfall at the courage of her resilience, her once sparkling blue eyes were switched to dull and lifeless as she kicked and screamed my name as I felt my body being carried off into the darkness of the nighttime empty road, outside of our apartment building in Spain as my straight dark hair swung with the movement of my body being forced without my command.

My strawberry ice-cream cone had stuck to the tar as I had a glimpse of its pink color wetting the road with its sweetness. My then gloomy memory of a warm summer night, giggling, counting stars and eating ice-cream with my mother at 2am on the steps, had been broken down into a form shattered happiness as they had taken a turn around the huge black van, marching to place me inside.

"Let go of my son!" I heard my mother scream as I felt my face being drenched with tears as something had told me that I was never going to see her again, that the only person I loved was going to fall away with the crumbling of my world "Mommy! Don't let them take me! Mommy!" I fought them as much as an eight year old could "let him go! Let him go! Please that's my baby! That's my kid! He's just a kid!"

I saw a needle in the corner of my eye glimmering in the light of the streetlamp as another white spacesuit had boldly approached me, stabbing me in one swift movement, piercing my soft skin with its force as I could feel the liquid invade my body, its substance fought to shut my eyes, to shut me down and then I saw it,

A tall tree emerge from the middle of the street to pierce the black van from the bottom up, puncturing it's whole body easily as if it was a pin pricking through a sheet of paper, the van lifted with the growth of the tree as vines had sprung loose from every surrounding tree in our street, like green strong whips, sliding and wrapping its way around the white spacesuit men and pulling them in as the vines retracted from the trees that had grown them in the time that was given to them.

The man holding me was wrapped in leaves, vines and yellow flowers as I felt my weak body being taken into the arms of someone else.

My vision was beginning to blur as I could feel my eyes rolling in directions that I couldn't control. I felt my body beginning to heat up, like it did before, like it did when I sat in the burning building of my mother's work when I was four.

I blinked as I had seen him, trying to adjust my vision to seeing crystal clear although my eyes were failing, he stared down at me as I stared up at him. I was held across his arms from the left one to the right,

It reminded me of when the fire fighter had carried me out of my mother's building, holding me in his arms like this stranger now did.

Sharp, dark features, dark brown eyes and strands of rough dirty blonde hair.

"You don't know me, but I need to take Luca, he needs to leave with me." He said to my mother as she ran towards us out of breath in a state of panic and then, I- I- he-

My vision shook as if the world was vibrating and then I began to see blur, the poison in my veins had forced my body to shut down as if I was a robot being unplugged from a cord, a robot of once light,

Shutdown, to be engulfed by darkness.