Sound the Bugle

Chapter I - How It All Changed

"Shut up, April! If it weren't for you Mom would still be here to listen to your pathetic troubles! You little twerp!" my eldest sister cried with a passion.

I can remember the days my family once prided me. Those were happy, wonderful times when each member of my family loved one another. We would go swimming together in the ocean only a half hour drive away and see movies together after. We would bake together. We would even have family fun nights. Those were the days before my family fell apart.

Though vague the memory is, I have held onto it and it is the only thing that has kept me going through life after returning home from the hospital after my accident. I was only eight years old. I can't remember exactly what happened. Mother said not to worry, that everything would be alright. The accident had unsettled me, I was told. I had an ominous feeling that there was something important she was avoiding saying to me. Little would she know, that was her last chance to tell me because everything was about to change for the worse, and things would never get better.

I was in my mother's Kia, returning home from a three day stay at the hospital, when my mother suddenly pulled over to the side of the road. She told me that she would only be a minute, that she would be right back. There must have been trouble with the engine, she had said.

She then popped the hood of the sedan, and got out of the vehicle to take a look. Within fifteen minutes, a large white van parked ahead of us. I heard muffled sounds, what I assumed to be the driver asking her if she was in need of assistance. I could only assume my mother would turn them down, being the strong willed thirty-three year old she was, but the white van didn't leave.

Instead I heard more din coming from where I believed my mother to have stood. I thought I may have even heard my mother attempt to scream. I tried to reason with myself that I must have been mistaken, for I could only hope she would be alright. I wouldn't have been able to help her.

How could I have helped when I was still relearning to walk after the accident?

That was the question I used for years after my mother's abduction to justify why I had not jumped out of the vehicle in an attempt to save her, why I had not risked myself for my mother. I would never know why my mother was abducted or even who had abducted her. Somehow I know now there was something important my mother was supposed to tell me before she would be gone from my life for, as far as I knew, the rest of my life.

After what seemed like hours after my mother did not return to the vehicle, a Good Samaritan found me helpless in the vehicle crying my eyes out and called 9-1-1. The police picked me up and called my family down to the station to file a missing person report. We slept at the station that night and life since has never been worse.

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I know it's not very long, but hey, I finally started a book so your welcome. ~FRR