Campgrounds******KEEP WITH GRADES 11 AND 12*********

• Audrey Smith, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2022

As my mother sat across from me, she stared at me, then she stared at the handcuffs that were restraining my hands. I thought back to the reason why we are even here right now. My father and that one camping trip.
I watched as my mother looked out the window, the sun hiding behind the trees only to strike her in the face when we drove past the gaps. The annual trip began to feel boring and repetitive, it was just another excuse for my mother and my father to act like they don’t hate each other’s guts. Nightfall had come by the time we arrived at the camping site, it had become as withered as an old woman’s skin.
There are so many memories surrounding these campgrounds, the bad ones seem to outweigh the good though. Dancing around the campfire, hand in hand, turned to hiding from my father while his hand turned to a fist in my mother’s face. She was unrecognisable, beaten to a pulp.
It was the third day of the trip and it happened again. I found my father on top of my mother, he was screaming in her face. She saw me, looking from the lakeside, and her eyes begged me to look away. As I turned, my foot collided with a rock on the ground and I fell into the lake. I heard the muffled screams from my mother as she begged my father to go save me.
I heard his footsteps getting closer as he ran towards the lake, ready to jump in and pull me out. What he would never expect was me, behind him, holding the same rock I tripped over. I had to stop him, I had to protect my mother.
Before he could turn back, I hit him over the head with the rock, and continued to do so until blood poured out of his head. His blood, it was almost jam-like. It was like the hatred in his heart had turned his blood rocky and uneven. His red covered my clothes and my hands and it had started to drown out into the lake. My mother came running down the hill, but stopped in her tracks. “What have you done?” She screamed, continuing to run down the hill. She pushed me off my father, and brought his body into her lap.
My focus returned back to this room, my mother’s eyes still on me. The buzzing from the ceiling lights distracted my thoughts and they were no longer racing around my head. I thought I was protecting her. The red stains from his jelly blood still remain on my hands every time I look down at them. They were on her hands too, but somehow, I was the only accomplice in my father’s murder. I thought that I was protecting her. By telling the police that I was the one who had beaten my father to death with a rock, and not my mother.