Young Writers Society

Speak truely,type boldly, and spare no mercy: I need this ripped to shreds before I can reconstruct it.

Pietro was six the night our father died, and never let on that he could remember what happened. As far as our mother knew he was safe and tucked up in bed with the rest of us.

Pietro was the oldest of us, but his severe height disadvantage lost him the rights of the oldest child. Our tallest brother, the one who grew up to be a scholar, got his own bed first. The middle two would kick each other through the nights and Pietro and I would share with plenty of space between us. I was too young to remember that time, but I know that even when we were older and had each our own beds cramped into the circular room, on the coldest or scariest nights I would climb into Pietro’s bed out of habit and he would sing quiet lullabies.

By the time I got to school I would sing the words wrong because when he couldn’t remember them he would just make them up.

He never got the chance to be the toughest or strongest, to get the largest serving of food or the newest clothes. Pietro, like me, was small and scrawny and looked half the age he actually was. I can only imagine how small and fragile he must have seemed wandering through the dark.

We lived in an abandoned windmill that had all of the gears stripped out of it. There were three large round rooms stacked on top of each other, each one with two windows blocked with shutters.

Even on those winter nights our home was silent. The slightest sounds would stir our sweetest imaginations and deepest fears. That’s why that night was different. The noises he heard that night didn’t fit any of the make-believe monsters he had conjured to explain the creaks and groans that haunted us. He knew how to beat all of them, with his incantations and lullabies, but not these.

These weren’t make believe. They were too quiet, and far, far too real.

He sunk off the edge of the bed and onto the icy floor.

The door to our room was already ajar. It never used to stay open. Worry had become a habit of our mothers and now she left it that way so that she could hear if any of us woke up crying.

Pietro clambered up the stairs to our parents bedroom where the chill of the air made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He crossed the room, pausing several times to touch whatever familiar objects he could see until he found his way to the brittle wood of the window shutters. They opened with a shove and a soft white light painted a path across the room.

The bed where our parents used to lie was empty and the other side of the room lay our father’s toolbox. He unclipped the latch as he had done without permission many times before just to marvel at the tools inside. This time he dared to reach in, scratching his wrist as he dug through for the large wrench that, in the simplicity of his six year old mind, seemed like the best weapon to use simply because it was the heaviest thing he could carry.

With each step he took downwards towards the first floor the light brightened until he could see the ground floor down the dark, winding stairs.

Our mother was stood by the kitchen in her evening trousers, and that thick jumper that she always wore on the coldest mornings when her breath would whirl out from behind the unzipped collar.

Three men surrounded her: clothed in dark brown and each one concealing his face. The only one Pietro could see clearly was a man who had pulled a pair of blacked out goggles up onto his forehead. His eyes were like narrow slits, with veiny whites and blood black pupils.

They had weapons that Pietro didn’t recognise from any of his story books, nor did the resemble any evil king or wayward warlock.

These were real bad guys, the kind that nobody ever talks about in fairy tales. The kind that were too scary even for children. He couldn’t remember what they’d spoken about, only that mother sounded strange and the men- hostile.

She stood with her back to the table. To Pietro she looked very much unlike our mother. She was tense and her fists were clenched so hard her knuckles turned white. In her eyes was an expression of energy and defiance- not a maternal one. No. This was not like a mother protecting her children. This one was bitter and vengeful, and even though I would never see this expression Pietro never would never forget it. She looked foreign, not like our tender, devoted mother, but a wild and rebellious woman. The kind of woman who would never bow or yield if it meant abandoning her grace. This was a real woman.

The room was filled with light. Usually we used the Camon jars with their soft yellow light that would charge up in the sunlight, but when they weren’t in use mother wrapped them in cloth to keep them warm so that they’d still work in the dark hours of morning. The electric light hadn’t worked in a long time; the circuit had been cut and nobody had bothered to repair it, but there it was, shining up above their heads with its unnatural white glow.

It was a detail that as a child Pietro overlooked, because little things like that don’t really matter. Broken things get mended, lost things get replaced, food gets put magically on the table, it’s all in the wonder of ‘what adults do that children don’t really care about.’ The thought of it faded in his memory.

He only remembered the men, and how one of them launched forward and attacked her. Mother didn’t even flinch. There was a gash of blood across her cheek that left a splatter across the dusty floor.

Pietro took another step down and as he did the silence was broken as the wrench clanged against the step behind him.

One of the men looked up.

‘No!’ She snapped, and in that moment that purely natural and purely primitive part of her died. It was the last essence of who she was before she was our mother. Maternal instinct kicked in and the glimmer of her youth that echoed in her eyes was lost forever. I never saw anything except my mother, but Pietro says he remembers and I cling to every word he says about what she was like back then.

Mother, now our mother, and not the woman of defiance, could do nothing. The man in the middle who still had his goggles on pounded up the stairs just far enough to reach Pietro and lifted him into the air by the collar.

Pietro didn’t make a sound. He just hung in the air and clung to his weapon unsure of what to do next. Some puerile faith inside him told him that simply having it would protect him from harm.

The third man grabbed our mother from behind.

‘What if we kill you in front of him?’ The narrow eyed man said. Mother didn’t respond to him. ‘What if we kill him in front of you?’

‘Why are you doing this?’ She begged. ‘My husband is dead, our family is broken. What more will you take from us?’

The one who held Pietro up in the air waited for a response, so still as if his suit had been left starched upstanding and left without a body inside.

‘Leave them.’ The narrow eyed man said at last.

‘But-’

‘That’s an order!’

The other two looked at each other. Pietro was lowered back down to the ground and our mother was released. Just as silently as they’d come they left through the front door.

If Pietro hadn’t been there the outcome would have been different. If she had defended herself she would have condemned us.

She drew a deep breath and with calm, gentle hands she pried the wrench from my brothers tiny hand and carried him back up to bed. ‘You’re dreaming,’ she whispered. ‘Soon it will be time to wake up.’

He latched his arms around her neck and watched as the light from the bulb slowly faded until darkness overtook their steps.

She lay him down at the other end of the bed to where I was sleeping and pulled the cover over him. Without a story, or lullaby, or even a kiss goodnight she moved slowly like an apparition out of our room.

When he asked her the next morning she laughed at the idea.

‘Stop scaring your brothers,’ she said. ‘If I had been hurt, wouldn’t I still have a cut? And it’s too dark at night.’

‘The light was on.’

‘This one?’ She flicked the switch half a dozen times. ‘It’s been broken for months, you know that.’ If she’d ignored it then Pietro wouldn’t have thought, and he wouldn’t have remembered. He kept the mysteries in his mind, spinning them round and round and listening to his mothers explanations until only two remained.

If he had never been awake, then he would never have gone up to his mothers room, or to his fathers toolbox, and never would have scratched his arm on the blade of a hand saw. Her wounds may have gone away, but his didn’t.

The second was that she was smiling and acting like it was joke. This didn’t matter until years later when it occurred to him that, for a woman who’s husband had just died, she seemed unusually calm and easily amused in a situation where she should have lost her temper with a six year old telling scary stories at the breakfast table- in front of younger siblings who splattered food or whined or threw tantrums whilst she struggled to cope for the first time on her own.

It was unnatural.

To a child it made sense, because children don’t think about those things, and Pietro never spoke of that night again. He kept it all in his head though, scrawled like a memoir that nobody was supposed to read.

He has a scar on the back of his wrist to this day. When the wound from that night faded he went up to the toolbox in secret, took out the saw and raked it across his skin. He told our mother that he had fallen on a piece of scrap metal dropped by a passing trader. It seems crazy at first, but the more I think about Pietro, and the more I understand six year old logic, it’s the kind of crazy I could believe from him.

Even now there is still a taught pale line on his wrist to serve as a reminder of something he swore never to forget.