Blindness
Danny once tried to run away so much did he hate his father. He was only ten at the time and he got as far as the creek in the woods before turning back. It was too dark and he was frightened, tired and hungry. He'd been crying hard when he fled the house and fallen down several times on the dirt road, tearing his pants and skinning his knees. He screamed then, furious at the pain, anguished that not one of his neighbors came out to see to him.
If his mother had been alive, she would have taken him home and cleaned him up.
Walking back snuffling on the mucous clogging his ears and nose, he told himself when he grew up he'd get back at him, he'd kill him if that was what it took. But when he entered the filthy house and saw his father lying passed out on the couch he methodically began to pick up as he knew he should, scraping the plates and neatly stacking them in the sink to be cleaned the next day after school. Then he went up to bed, gently easing his sore body onto the soiled sagging mattress.
Years later he cast a critical eye on that experience and wondered angrily at the indifference of a small society to the cries of a helpless child.
I wonder what he must have felt that night he was killed as his screams in the silent darkness fell on deaf ears, how completely disillusioning it must have been to realize that nothing in the world had changed.