mock.

his piercing screams echoed off the walls, and filled my heads with thoughts so terrible i could hardly contain my own quiet whimpers of fears. i didn't understand. my sticky sheets clung to my body; i felt trapped and restrained. i could see nothing, only think darkness and hot, heavy air that left me gasping for breath surrounded me. i was very alone.

no child should have to hear their father cry. how could i have known that there was nothing to be afraid of when there was no-one there to comfort me?

i tried to remember his gentle smile. the way he used to wrap his strong arms around me in a loving embrace and then throw me up in the air. he would always make me feel like i could fly, yet never fail to be there to catch me. i could faintly smell his soft, musty scent - so comforting, so safe. yet when i tried to recal his hearty laughter, all i could hear were the tormented groans coming from the room next to mine.

as the tears fall silently down my cheeks, i began to see his shrunken frame lying in his bed. it would be how i would always remember him now. translucent skin stretching over his bones, like butter scraped over too much bread. unshaved beard, like pinpricks on his jaw. arms lying by his side, once powerful yet now weak and feeble. his ribs were vivid and protruding, as if the world was starving him of life. nothing my mother fed him could make his stomach grow large and portly again. and his eyes ... they chilled me inside. so sad, so pathetic. he was ashamed of his illness, distressed at the state he was in. for once, my father could do nothing to help me, to help himself. a sense of hopelessness consumed the atmosphere within my home.

my mother was just as lifeless. she cooked, she cleaned, she took me to school and picked me up. she thought i couldn'e hear the emptiness in her voice. in my mind, i imagined her as a robot, completely void of emotion. one night i heard her sobbing, broken. like me, she ws alone, but there was no way i could reach her. i could only stand and gaze through the glass wall of her grief.

i was so scared. my emotions caused me to shake uncontrollably; there was no i could explain them.
anger at my parents for changing, for leaving me.
guilt for my father's condition. was it my fault? had i done something wrong?
that eveing, lying in the dark, i could feel an overwhelming mixture of sadness and frustration, and lack of control of the changes to my once stable family.

as i began to drift off to sleep, the noises in my father's room slowly fading away i saw a sudden flash of blue light up my room. Then another, accompanied by a wailing siren that made my ears bleed. my father immediatly started to shriek in agony, louder than ever before. the front door opened, and i heard footsteps running up the stairs in time with my frantic heartbeat. i began to panic, bile rising in my throat. i struggled to breathe as my father let out one last scream that sliced into my skin.
silence.

it was over.
i curled tightly into a ball beneath my sticky sheets, encased in the unpenetrable darkness, and let the grief flow from me. my father's pain had ended.

but he had been dead to me for a while.
nothing would ever change that.