• The mid-morning sunlight slid into the miniscule storage shack through a lonely broken window and empty door frame. The building was old, very old. Its wooded walls blackened from rot, partially from age, partially from the many times it had swelled and deflated from North Carolina’s humid summers and dry winters. Shattered glass littered the unstable shelves and the dust-covered boards acting as a floor. A few jars stabbing at the air with their jagged points held the waters of recent rain, and some held that of even more recent tears. As the light gently caressed the water’s surface, colors were thrown in every direction, spraying lightshows that extended until reaching the gloom of the walls. The slanting light revealed the piercing shards hiding like chameleons on the ground around us, stinging my eyes with the reflection’s harsh glint, though only wishing to sting my flesh. The clear blue sky above me stared down through a gaping hole in the roof where tile had long ago blown away, mocking me, joining the sun with its ironic laughter. The day was beautiful; my life was not.
    Sheltered under my right arm was my younger brother, Zachary. His sandy blonde hair tightly curled over his small head, covering his hearing aid attached to his right ear. His large brown eyes glittered, confused, scared, yet content. He was only three years of age, completely unaware of what was happening around him. Fortunately.
    My sister huddled in the corner to my left, pale, bony arms hugging her legs tightly to her body. Her brown hair tumbled to her shoulders, threads jutting out in every direction. She was four—but only seven months older than Zachary. She was aware of what happened. This was almost a daily routine, and now she had practiced it for long enough to understand why.
    As the morning progressed and the sun rose, the day warmed. The air inside stunk of swear and hung with humidity.
    And it pressed us with a heavy silence.
    Then from inside the house came a sudden blood-curdling shriek, followed by indistinguishable alien growls. The screams came from my mother. The shouts, from my drunken father.
    Shadows danced back and forth across the house’s window as something smashed into the hanging fan. The screams stopped, only for a second, and even though it wasn’t nearly loud enough to reach outside the pale yellow panels surrounding the house, I could hear the sobs from countless experiences. I could see the tear-streaked face, the dark brown hair matted with sweat, the watery brown eyes angrily begging for him to stop. I could smell the alcohol wafting from them.
    Then the situation reversed, as always, with my mother shouting, throwing frantic slaps driven by desperation and rage and pain. I turned away.
    This was the point where my mistake of existence had haunted me so many times before. Finding that they could not release the frenzied fury from their injured souls on each other, they would turn against me.
    I was six, a mere child, already with the maturity of someone much older. I had never truly had a childhood. I never knew the naïve innocence, the “everyone’s-good-inside” view of life. Instead, I knew only anger, fear, and pain.
    Slowly, I counted to seventy-five—fifty for the anger within the house to cool, and twenty-five to be completely sure it’s safe. No sounds escaped past the pale panels, none that I could hear. I cautiously stood, and instinctively, Nicole and Zachary followed suit. Warily, I stepped out of our hazard-infested safe house, and couldn’t help thinking, like I thought every day, the incredible lie that weighed down on me from the dark, uncharted dungeons within my mind: in part, it was my fault. I was to blame for the torture we endured every day. I was responsible for keeping my brother and sister from the wrath of those monsters, and every time I tried to protect them, I failed—in fact, it seemed I made everything worse by simply being there. My very existence caused pain.
    The sun crushed me with waves of heat, and from the distance, a siren reached my ears; a siren separated by miles of pavement. Those hope-inspiring sounds actually degraded me, because I knew the source never came to this civil neighborhood. There was nothing within me that any longer hoped to hope. I was here, I was always here, and I was here to stay in this life of continuous anguished terror. Nothing I could ever do to change that, nothing anyone else would ever do about it.
    Today, though, was different.