That Man

• Ruby Flanagan-sjoberg, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2018

Sitting here thinking, just breathing and thinking. Specifically thinking about how it all got screwed up so quickly. I really don’t know how he managed this, my life was finally going well. I had the career in sight, the girl in arms, and the grief under the carpet. I had it together. Now it’s all unravelled. “Why”? You may want to know. Well, to be honest, me too.

Let’s try to figure this out.

I guess it started when I was a young girl, I always needed something to keep me occupied. You may think that’s every kid, I was different though. I needed to be occupied by my own thoughts. Not just imaginary friends and lava on the floor, it was so much deeper than that. I needed inspiration, something to set off my mind, to make it think. So, brain teasers. It worked for a while and then I managed to find the pattern that every teaser had.

This continued throughout my childhood. I’d find something to distract me and then it would be old news by the next week. Why couldn’t I be normal? Just be distracted by TV or a toy. But no, I needed to distract myself and make myself think.

“What on earth would you need to be distracted from at such a young age”? You may say, well. Shall I explain that too, okay? Well, my family is the usual spilt up family. Mum got sick of Dad drinking his life away, so she left him. A bit sexist to call that the usual but it’s all I’ve ever known. I needed to be distracted from the screaming and fighting, the constant bickering. It was so much more than just squabbling and disagreements though.

I witnessed my Mother being thrown out of a window by a mob of drunken idiots, the leader being the man that the law makes me call my Father.

It’s horrific enough that they even had the thought of throwing the only person that ever loved me out of a window. But what makes it so damn traumatising is the fact that they didn’t think twice, and they threw her out that window into a pile of kindling and sparks.

Yes sparks, that kindling was on fire. That ‘Father’ of mine murdered my Mother. And I witnessed this at the age of eleven.

Yes, that’s horrid, unforgettable, traumatising to the extent that it’s not possible to be forgotten. Somehow, I grew from that. I have lived with that every day of my life for the past five years. I’ve lived with the fact that my ‘Father’ didn’t get jail time for the crime that he committed for some ungodly reason. I found justice within myself to grow.

Now he’s back in my life five years later, and he has managed to make a mess of things again. That man does not deserve to take another step, another breath, another beat of his heart.

I am making sure of that.