Burnt Cities

Chapter 1

Hi. My name is Somaya. Most people prefer to call me Maya though. I live in Springs with my parents and my younger brother Charles and I am basically the black sheep in my family.

My mother was the "It Girl" in high school she entered pageants and won all of them. She was beautiful, had a great body and was envied by all the girls in her school. In her final year of high school, she decided to work in the local bar and with her savings she would travel the world after she had graduated from high school. And that's how she met Dan Purple, my dad.

My father was pretty good looking himself. He was intelligent and when he met my mother, he was doing his final year of his law degree. My mother fell for his charms, he knocked her up, she fell pregnant and all my mother's plans of travelling the world were history.

My father graduated and got a job in Springs, bought us a new house and we have been living here for as long as I can remember.

Two years after I was born, my little brother Charles came into the picture. He was just perfect, you could see the pride in my father's eyes every time he looked at him. He was everything my father imagined his first child to be, and I was nothing close to it.

I never felt like my father loved me, so when I was five I asked my mother,

"Does daddy love me?"

"Of course he does honey,"

"Does he love Charles more?"

"Your father loves you both equally"

"Then why does he always play with Charles and never plays with me?"

"Well that's because daddy and Charles are boys, and boys like to play together. I'll play with you honey."

My mother is a sweet woman and has never fallen short of her duties as a mother. Since my father is bringing in enough income to give us all a pretty comfortable life, she stays at home and has enough time to do all the 'mother duties'.

When I was a little child, my father would come home around 7 pm, and on some nights he would come home after we had gone to bed. One night (I was about 6 at that time), I was awake when he came home. I listened as he got out of his car and went upstairs. I heard him open Charles' bedroom and about a minute later, he closed it gently and went to the bedroom he shared with my mother. My parents must've gotten into an argument because for a few minutes, all I could hear were thuds, as if something was hitting the wall, repeatedly. The house went dead quiet and soon afterwards, my mother left their room and came to mine. She gently lifted the bed covers, assuming that I was asleep. She lay next me and wrapped her arms around me. I turned around to face her and from the moonlight coming through my bedroom window, I could see tears streaming down her face.

"Did he hurt you?"

"No honey, daddy would never hurt me, he loves me, he loves us. We just had a little argument. He had a bad day at work and he is a little upset. Go to sleep honey."

The following morning when I woke up, my mother was in the kitchen making breakfast for everyone. And on the pillow where she had slept the night before, there was a blood stain.

I grew to love reading. I loved the idea of someone creating a world in their head, transferring it into writing and me being able to use the very same idea, to create a different world in my mind. The characters would differ, our towns wouldn't look the same, two people would never have the same image in their head. And that's kind of how people operate too; we all have a single story, we are born, we live and we die, but the way our story plays out is different for everyone.