TWILIGHT ZONE

Every night Emma saw Chandler's furious face, heard his angry voice, and felt the cold sting of knife to flesh as he lashed out at her. She knew now, the answers to the policeman's questions. She had a lapse in her memory, between the moment she stood in the kitchen; and the moment she awoke at hospital. The lapse was filling. Her memory had begun to patch itself with images from her nightmares and snippets from misinterpreted adult conversations.

Nothing made sense anymore. Everyone she loved was disappointing her. First there were her parents who inflicted horribly painful surgeries on her. Then there was Uncle Chan, who attacked her in a moment of rage. Everything was topsy turvy, the people she loved most were now the people she feared most. Why were her loved ones hurting her?

When her dad held her down while a doctor pushed a tube up her nose, was that reality or a nightmare? When her mom refused to give her food or water for hours on end because surgery was on the next day, was that a nightmare or reality? When Uncle Chandler stabbed her in the stomach, was that reality or a nightmare? It seemed there were no limits to the cruelty of the adults around her. She didn't understand adults.

Every time she begged her parents to let her off the hook, they would look so sorry and heartbroken. They would cry, kiss her, hug her, shower her with presents and apologise a million times over, but somehow, they would never give her the only thing she wanted: to avoid surgery.

Hopped up on morphine, when she was awake she felt asleep. Hopped up on adrenaline, when she was asleep she felt awake. She spent half her life now, caught in the twilight zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, lost in the cloud of opiates the doctors pumped into her little body. All this terror, sadness, confusion, drugs, surgeries, doctors, nurses and police was too much for her fragile young mind to process.

Her four year old mind was kicking into overdrive. The notion of Uncle Chandler stabbing her permeated her surroundings. She heard her parents discuss it when they thought she was asleep; she heard the nurses, doctors and police debate about it when they thought she wasn't listening; she witnessed it every night in her dreams. In her haze of morphine, terror and confusion, she was now convinced that Chandler had stabbed her. It was as clear to her, as the fact that her parents persistently inflicted surgeries on her. Emma tugged gently on Leonard Greene's shirt.

"Grandpa, I can tell the policemens now, how I was hurted," Emma whispered anxiously.

Leonard put his newspaper down, his heart beating like a battle drum. This was the moment everyone had been waiting for, the time when Emma would be ready to explain what had happened to her on that terrible day. Leonard didn't know Chandler that well, but he felt sorry for the poor bastard, and was relieved to know that the police could now let the guy off the hook. So long as Emma was withholding her statement, Chandler remained a suspect. Holding Emma at arms' length, Leonard watched Emma with serious eyes.

"How, Emma? How did you get hurt?" he said breathlessly.

"Uncle Chandler cutted me with a knife."