Years ago tragedy struck the Calloway's causing the family to fall apart. Lucariah Augustine St. Francis Calloway was left in the ruins of it all with a mother who couldn't bother and a father who disappeared one night with his older brothers. For...
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The moment we reached Evan's home I was force fed a painkiller and promptly taken to my room.
It seemed to me that this was the place they put me when they didn't know what to do with me. Out of sight, out of mind.
Like always.
I lay on my bed, leg propped up on a pillow, reading the ingredients on a lotion bottle. I had nothing better to do. And my unoccupied mind became a dangerous place too fast for my liking.
There was music playing- too muffled by the walls to hear what it was- but it had me thinking how great it would be to have the confidence and the energy to go out there and just sit and listen.
I always loved music. From soothing melodies to heart thrumming booms. It was my undying passion; the only thing that never changed. My life was made up entirely of pain and sorrow, but the one glimmer of light stood in the tunes.
I closed my eyes, mentally amplifying the noise. This is what peace felt like. My body melted into the sheets and I pretended to become one with my surroundings.
No one can find me here. In this vast endlessness. It's not a void like before. Not while I was asleep. This was something acutely similar to dying in one's sleep after a long fulfilling life.
This is what it was like to not have a restlessness in your bones that only prisoners and trapped birds could ever understand.
I took a breath and released it as slow as it came.
Before I knew; I drifted off to sleep.
There are five things you need to understand about sleep- my sleep in particular:
1.) My mother force fed me pills that made me drowsy, daily, when I was six. Therefore my body is accustomed to the feeling.
My mother's eyes were bloodshot, her hand gripping my thin arm in a tight knuckled grip as she dragged me to the kitchen.
She said I was annoying her. I just wanted her to read me a story before bed.
My eyes widened when I saw her pull out a large bottle filled to the brim with hard shelled medicine. I did and I didn't understand what was going on in that moment.
"Mommy no!" I had screamed, trashing in her hold as she pried my mouth open. "Mommy no! No, please!"
I knew she forced these down my throat and I was basically falling over in less than an hour. I wouldn't wake until the sun was high in the sky the next afternoon.
My days were short and unpleasant in that time. The time it was just the two of us. That was the first of many nights of the same.
It became part of our routine. A nightly ritual.
2.) I haven't slept more than four hours a night since I was eight.
I stood by my open window, counting the stars as if it'd cradle me to sleep. As if it'd take me away from the smell of rotting decay.
It'd been my third night here; hearing the sounds of torture, smelling the smell of pain.
I was subject to the abuse four times already. I know the sounds all too well and if these stars don't come down, wrap me in their warmth and take me up, up, up with them, I'll loose my mind.
Perhaps it was already gone. My eyes were heavy and my body ached but I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.
Nothing could prevent me from keeping my guard up and staying alive. Not a drink of cloudy water, nor a wink of sleep.
3.) I do not enter the REM stage of sleep- therefore I am always aware when something shifts in the room.
My head rest on a firm pillow, hunched in on myself in the corner of my cold room. The winter was brutal and my clothes were thin.
But I was tired and sleep was calling me by my full name. My eyes shut on there own accord and I felt myself drift off to sleep.
I could hear everything. I heard when they entered my cell that night.
"This him?" A gravelly voice questioned.
"Yuh, boss said this kid's been limping for a week and won't eat."
I couldn't help but whimper. My leg was giving me trouble for the past month, but I've been a good boy and kept my pain to myself.
It was after I went home with that rich man, he did something to my leg. He did something really bad to my leg.
I wanted to tell the boss, but we weren't allowed to talk. Not to him. Not to each other.
"How old?"
"Boss said he was nine- I think?"
The unknown man hummed. "I'll take care of it." He lifted me off the mattress on the floor, hauling me out of my cell.
My eyes flew open, hoping we were on our way to the infirmary. I needed the doctor to fix the pain. But we didn't go there.
We took me to the basement where the worst beating I'd ever received occurred.
I passed out, from trauma or something else I could never tell, I woke hours later laying in the cold cold snow.
4.) When and if I do get sleep, they end in nightmares.
I was running, running so fast the scenery blurred as I passed. My heart was racing, pounding like a steady drum in my ears.
My foot kept catching on uplifted roots and I felt dread full my entire being every single time.
"No," I muttered to myself, forcing my legs to run faster. "No," I sucked in a breath and felt a sharp pain on my calf.
Blood spurting out of it with every step I took. The pain became too much. It enveloped me in its clutches and held on tight as I writhed on the floor.
My heart strummed faster than it ever had before and suddenly all was dark. All was silent.
No birds sung and no stars lit my way. Where did the world go?
I looked at my injury and cursed; loud and clear, at the open wound, the thick red skin around it, the dark bruising.
I nearly vomited at the sight and- I've been here before. Why am I here again?!
My eyes frantically searched the endlessness as my breath became shallow. I know this place.
I know how this story ends.
I thrashed and kicked at the open air. A pair of awfully familiar eyes loomed over me. In his hands a gun.
