Into The Dark

• Rebecca Batrouney, Grade 12, Balwyn High School -
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition

Folks don’t like the dark. That blackness can be looming, overwhelming- especially when it’s the colour of your skin.
My brother William, he found it easier to just accept that he was an outcast, a foreigner in our own tired old town. After all, watching people shed their skin from afar is exciting. Up close its just uncomfortable.
Perceiving life through his eyes was like staring at the reflection of a funhouse mirror. All the people came out distorted and textured, their worst features widened and lengthened. It might not have been as scary if it didn’t look so real.
Their hatred for us seemed exponential, tangible. The way it always had been.
The rain continued to mutter to itself quietly outside my window. I listened. The wind carried those cruel whispers, they swept under my closed bedroom door. My hands shook.
In my dreams that night, the great tapestry of humanity was hung in front me, in all its brilliance. I was shown the tiny stitches which constituted my life, and they were stained with blood. The other folks in this town were coloured in gentle hues of green, my family was blackened, obtrusive in stark contrast. The juxtaposition made me sick.
Their hatred for us was exponential, tangible. The way it always had been.
Those harsh words and poisonous glances were unrelenting. There was a time when we were oblivious, my brother and I. Our naivety had since been wrenched away from us.
Those languid summer days and steamy Sunday mornings will always hold heavy in my mind, unweathered by time’s unyielding hand:
“William! Cal!” I remember always jolting awake at the warning in my mama’s voice.
“You’d best believe you’re gonna get an ass whooping if you ain’t dressed and ready for church in three minutes.”
I tugged at the high neckline of my Sunday best. I thought it was awful looking and wholly impractical. In my rosy youth I could not, for the life of me, understand why I couldn’t wear the pants and shirt that my brother did.
My mama hummed those sweet bible hymns as we walked back home.
The white folks jeered at us on our way. Their glares felt like a poison seeping into the dark red and off yellow of my insides.
My mama just kept on humming.
Every now and then I can still feel the remnants of that toxic venom trickling through the valleys of my bloodstream, slowly travelling to my rapidly convulsing heart. Mama’s dead and gone, but somehow the beating of my heart always seems to become the beating of a drum for her voice to sing in time with. And somehow the thud of my heart sounds like the thud of the footsteps we took to and from church, and somehow despite all the dirty looks, I feel clean.
Every now and then I still dream of that glorious tapestry, and I see my stitches, and they are of some imperceptible colour, too beautiful to comprehend.