Shattered

Chapter I: On a rough start…

Another boring day… Yay… It's cloudy, everything is grey… Except for my soul, which is dark black, and my body, which is purple… No, it's mostly my arm in fact… Yeah, it's just my arm… There's no friend I can play with, no one I could talk to, no one to see… I'm alone… And inside, buried deep inside my chest, I had a heavy pound which always tells me it's only the beginning… I'd always deny this. If it really was the beginning, then what's this thing called present I live in? Only one word can describe it, and it's not perfect at all, it doesn't mean anything… Hell… How can people say "What the hell" as they have never ever seen this place? I just laugh at them… I'd gladly let them take my place as I take theirs… Right now, I want to be anywhere but here…

I've always been an outcast, ever since I was born… It's just the way it's meant to be… Some people are born with fame, others with brains… I was born as an outcast. I can't do anything against it…

But I feel strange here…

Like somehow I just don't belong…

And this feeling's deep inside my skin… It burns me every day I see my parents…

They're not really ones in fact… They're just my executioners…

But it's just the way it was meant to be… It's my past, my present, and hopefully not, my future…

What can I do to live like any normal kid? Why aren't they like any other parents? Waking me up for school, making dinner, helping me with my homework, playing with me…? I'm their only child and still, it's like if I wasn't there… I'm invisible for them… I don't exist… I'm alone, on a Friday night, with no TV, no game… Just the window… And these parents playing with their kids… Outside, everything is so wonderful… But I can't even think about running away… What would it change, anyway? Nothing. But the grass over there just keeps getting greener and greener each day…

That's when I heard a loud crash…

Then other loud noises that made everyone outside looking at my house… A house which wasn't a home…

Some kids even hid behind their parents as it was getting louder and louder…

This is how it all begins… This is how it must ends…

I'm just a kid and life is a nightmare… Welcome to my life… Now, meet my family… Daniel, my mad father, and Sherry, my worn-out mother…

But I can't complain. They had a harder life before they 'decided' to have me. In fact, I was like an accident… Maybe I shouldn't have been born…

The couch. Always behind the couch. Under the table. The closet under the stairs. Three places to run. Three places to hide. Every time their voices would rise I would run to the closest sanctuary and thank God I was small enough to fit. But for how long 'till they could find me… And get me? Those voices that ran across each corner of the room seemed to reverberate off my very skin. Dad. He told me to call him Sir. Never Dad. He had to have the utmost respect from everyone… Maybe it was because of this that he got fired… Mom. She told me to call her Sherry. She was so pretty when she slept. She was so pretty when she was happy. Now, her body of twenty seven years was old. Tired from no sleep, breaking from fingertips pressed into her sides, and boiling with too hard of liquor for her fragile, porcelain outline. It was because of him…

After every uproar, every tear by her, and every empty bottle by him they would come looking. Her, happy to see him turn his malice towards me. Him, happy to turn his malice away from himself. I was the six year old pathetic coward. I was the six year old defenseless and useless kid they had never wanted… I was a six year old burden…

Sir, I would say.

My eyes would wander to Sherry with frightened curiosity.

What had I done?

What had I done to deserve this?

I called him sir. I called her Hannah.

They called me Christopher at school. Only when they would show up, dressed up and smiling, once or twice a school year…

They called me Christopher at church. As they wanted to show everyone how happy our family was… Dressed up, smiling, handsome and beautiful, saying some clever words… Speaking with the religious man about how love is the heart of a family…

But they were different… When no one's around and we're at house… Not home, because it isn't one…

They called me Monster at house.

Monster…

What's such a thing?

After black, they would confine me to my room. A tiny room with one window, where their words said minutes earlier would form long sentences and wrap around in a circle above my head like those music boxes loving mothers would clip to the sides of their infants cribs. I hated my room. I hated the dark. They knew it, too, and took pleasure in locking me in. Locking me in where they could get me. I was their toy… For I was a monster.

And I wasn't allowed to show up for dinner…

Because there wasn't even one for me. I only have one meal a day, at that's all… I know we're not poor, but he had to find money to buy his drinks that make him go mad… And that money came from my meals. Only one per day… But I'm still happy though, 'cause he wanted to reduce them to one per two days… But Sherry didn't agree…

And you, whom I don't know who you are, but who reads my mind right now: Please note, if you ever were a six year old child, remember what it was like to lay in bed and imagine that loud heartbeat pulsing thick from underneath your mattress. Remember that hand that hovered over your face once you've closed your eyes. Remember that loud breathing that resided around your open window. The creatures. That white little girl that crawled towards you in the night, hair hanging around the neck, fingers outstretched to a child, it is horrid. To an adult, it is a memory that most barely ever remembers… And you, how would react as a kid?