Hello, this is not exactly an article but it's something I wrote a while ago, it's purely fictional and it's in preparation for my article on child abuse. It's a short story which I hope you guys enjoy.
With its own notes, life is like a symphony, it plays its own tone and like a flute, it is an instrument to different music the music of life makes us dance according to what we hear. But to me, it’s not a pleasant one, it’s like salsa, very complicated. Its whispers are like the breeze of death to my ears and the pain of nine-inches nails stuck in my eyes. Nobody can adequately answer what life is in general but everyone reads he’s own meaning to life. If you ask me, life is sleeping with your problems and waking to find it multiplied in its folds. It’s the frustration of always trying again and again and failing even worst the next time. It is the constant hard work that’s paid in sorrows and sadness. It’s the pain of childbirth and the anguish of an ocean of candles to a child’s grave. Life is worse than dying a horrible death. In the simplest of answers, life is hell. This is life from the perspective of a broken soul… You might ask me why but you will never understand even if you work a thousand miles in my flip flops, you’ll get it a hundred percent wrong.
I had not always seen life like this and neither did I start up bad but trust me, the worst thing that will or can happen to someone is to taste the sweet, amorous and alluring taste of the good life and at the end of the day, crash from it. I had once lived like an emperor, do what I want, when I want but you would have thought all it needed for all that to change was just one, horrible night? My mother was the sole-provider of the family while my dad drank his soul away. She had built up the family into riches from nothing but starches. She had burnt herself body, soul and energy to make sure everyone including my wretched dad was comfortable but, yes he wasn’t. He would come home as drunk as sleep and still beat her up and forcefully make love to her while physically abusing her. He was a sadist. My mother was once a beautiful woman, a price for every man but now she was barely a shadow of her old self, looking haggard and far older than her real age. It was all out of the stress and abuse. That night, my father came home as drunk as usual; he was puking all over the place as headed for my mum’s room upstairs. And before he got there, he spilled and broke his beer and out of anger and frustration, he began to beat my mom again. He wasn’t always like this this either, but ever since he lost his job when I was seven was when he began his drunk adventure and took his frustration out through beating my mom.
As he beat her, she tried to run away from him but he pulled her by the hair and pushed her on the bed and went on pounding at her. As she struggled for her life, she felt a piece from the broken beer bottle and stuck it right into the side of his neck nearly severing his jugular vein, he fell straight to the ground, holding his neck as it continued to bleed with no sign of stopping. It was then he must have thought he could die and at that moment, he took her by the hair and dragged her down to the garage where he tied her up. As I watched through the keyhole after he locked me out, I saw him pouring some liquid on mum and then he lit a match with hate in his eyes, looked into her eyes and dropped it on her without hesitation. Within seconds, the flames had totally engulfed her, he watched her with a smile of satisfaction on his face as the whole house was drowned in her screams of anguish and pain, and without remorse in his heart, I could see total satisfaction in his eyes. I didn’t realize when tears started streaming down my face. What could I have done, I was only twelve.
He kicked open the door and saw me there. All he did was frown at me and threw me out of his way. Didn’t care for the repercussion of what he had done. He instead went to the kitchen to take another bottle of beer. I couldn’t believe what was happening, was happening. It was like a trance, a nightmare if I would say. How could one night go so horribly wrong? It was then it all sank in and totally mutilated my soul. He had killed her, he really had killed her! I recited in my mind to understand. It was then I did the unthinkable. I took a baseball bat from his collection and bashed him severally in his head while he stared at the TV “you killed her! You killed her!” I screamed. He got up in annoyance and lunged at me.
The rest that happened was just as surprising as what had happened earlier, he slapped me so hard I became disoriented before he tried to have sex with me. My own father was trying to rape me. I fought as hard as I could but the more I did the more he seemed to enjoy it. He went on with the beaten and after he had satisfied his lustful craze he left me beaten and broken down to my soul and went back to watch TV.
My own father no, Not my father, this DEMON couldn’t be my father. It was then I decided. I went to the drawers in the dining where he kept his revolver and picked it and while he still watched TV with his back turned, I shot that bastard. He was unlucky not to have died at once cause I went to him while he crawled on the floor with his last breathe and pumped the remaining five bullets into his head screaming and streaming down tears. Blood and brain matter everywhere. I left the house forever, with its horrors locked deep inside my now cold, dead heart. I now knew what it felt like to kill someone, to be a murderer… BY: joseph Mathew junior
