The Vocalist

An Original piece by Micayla M.

 It’s happening again. You scramble up the carpeted stairs but your foot catches and you fall. The voices take a life of their own, wrapping around your head and suffocating you. Louder now, with harsher tones. Each syllable seems to slash into you with renewed ferocity, causing unimaginable agony. Each pause in the line of verbal fire strikes you like lightning, dread courses through your body. Please God, not again.

      You struggle against the weight of unseen shackles and escape behind a pale door; however, the flimsy lock and splintered wood provide little refuge. You are shaken to you very core and collapse against the pathetic barrier; sweaty anxious hands clutch a stuffed bear as the war rages on. Tears sting and flow freely from your eyes as the voices seep through the door and permeate your mind. Thoughts race in and out in blips and fragments, you wonder why it has to be this way. There is only one certainty among the turmoil: this won’t be over smoothly.

      Was it ever not like this? Was there ever a calm before this vicious tempest that now shakes you to your very foundation? Perhaps, but the memories of such times are distant and vague. You burry your tear stained face in the soft fur of your companion as you struggle for any remembrance of a better life.

      A little girl with curly blond hairy, running barefoot through a quaint house in an even daintier Georgian town. The Pokémon theme song plays softly in the background as she giggles and plays with matchbox cars. Her mother asks her what she wants to be when she grows up and she smiles and replies with the same naïve answer. A Pokémon master, she’d be the very best like no one ever was. Back to her cars then, blissfully unaware of the tormented and torn future that awaits her. It was to be all his doing.
    A chorus of timid whimpers brings you back from your nostalgia. Fear intermingles with the noises of the battle below and tiny footsteps race past your room and into their own. That monster! They are too young for this, your siblings deserve a better childhood. Suddenly, a sharp crackle pierces through the symphony of chaos that lights your ears; your door, opens.
          Your eyes scan the scene frantically for the source of this musical disturbance. A strangled inhumane utterance leaps from your throat as a wooden space divider crashes to the floor. The once elegant oriental design now stained crimson with blood that is not its own, a jagged hole runs straight through it.
          Panicked tones float from one side in a pitiful decrescendo, winding down to nothing more than a pianissimo. Your eyes settle on your beloved mother. Slumped, hunched over, and bent practically in half by years of hardship. Always the same back-and-forth banter, but you convince yourself it’s never been quite this extreme. Never been quite this terrifying.

        Colorful accusation shoots forth from the other party as its song rises in one brutal crescendo. You look to your step-father. Rage in his eyes so deep that the notes he spits forth are hardly contained by a frantic unseen composer. The tension created by these two clashing melodies is almost palpable.

      You call out, internally. Grasp, at nothing before you. Yearn for a savior, some kind of mercy. What justifies such cruelty? You long desperately for a gentler melody. A lullaby plucked from the stories your past, brought forth now to grant you a peaceful rest and sooth your aching heart.

      But no, your unfortunate heart is broken. Crumpling to your knees, you cover your ears in a vain attempt to block out the hazardous new dynamic. It reaches its apex, a grandiose fortissimo of victory; or defeat, it is hard to tell.
      The composer rests his baton, there is no applause only dead quiet. The vocalist and the world fall silent.