Night After Night

• Tiegan Marsden, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2016

What’s the point in living when you have nothing left to live for?
It’s been two years since the war broke out in my home town and I still wake up from nightmares of the images I saw. A few days before it all went down, I was invited to go all the way up to Tailor’s Stitch and into Hell with Ellie, Corrie, and the others, but I couldn’t go because my parents had just gone on their trip and I had to stay and look after the house.
I stayed home on Commemoration Day ‘cause I’m not really into that stuff. I will never forget that night though, because that was the night the war began; the night all peace was lost. I was just chillin’ around and smoking when all of a sudden the power went off; it wasn’t anything too suspicious at the time though, because that happened a lot in Wirrawee. Later on that night there must have been hundreds of Air Force jets speeding around with no lights on. I just thought it was the Commem Day stuff though, so again, I didn’t really think too much of it.
The next morning I went around to Murray’s house; he worked for us, but there was no one there, so I walked to the Ramsay’s house - they were our neighbours - but no one there either. I walked around the corner and saw the Ramsay's in their car and they had hit a tree. I ran over to them but they were dead. They weren’t killed by the crash though, they had been shot. Mrs Ramsay, Mr Ramsay, even baby Jessica had been shot.
Seeing my neighbours shot to death freaked me out. It was horrifying. I will never forget that image of their bodies just slouched in the car seats covered in blood. I decided that I wouldn’t walk along the main road to get back to my house; I would walk through the bushes. I saw a few soldiers, but they weren’t ours. I got back to the house and hid out there, trying not to get spotted.
I remember hiding inside a closet for what felt like hours on end until finally they had gone. It was about 7 o’clock at night; I was sitting on a bed in the darkest room of the house when I heard them and leapt to my feet and quietly crept into the closet beside me. I watched anxiously through the cracks of the door as three young soldiers ransacked my house. They stole my mother’s gold necklace that she had left behind so it would be safe, all the cash they could find, and my father’s gold that his grandfather had dug up. I heard another soldier yell, “Hurry up! We’ve got more houses yet!” from outside near the front door. Approximately three seconds later, they were out of here. I stayed in the closet for a couple more minutes and then slowly made my way out. Still shaking I crept to the window to see that they had vanished. That’s how I lived the majority of the time from then on, hiding in closets and praying that I wouldn’t be seen.
I see the Ramsay’s faces every day, always in the back of my mind. I remember the games I used to play with little Jessica and the way our parents would talk and laugh. They say the first thing you forget about a person is the sound of their voice, but that’s not true, I still hear their voices, especially Jessica’s. (I let them in now, all the flashbacks and horrors, I don’t see them as that anymore though, I see them as memories.) I now know what I live for - I live for my remaining family and friends and I will die for those I love, whether they still walk the Earth or not.
After the war nothing was the same again; it still isn’t.