“I remember the screaming,” The girl said, her face turned away, “always, everyday.”
“Yeah, I remember it too,” I whispered, looking out over the empty playground, “and the tears.”
The girl heaved a sigh and nodded slowly, as if I’d just laid out the secrets of the Universe in front of her bare feet and she didn’t have enough time to unravel them all.
“Yelling and tears and…” The young girl hesitated, unwilling or unable to speak of it. Like it was a filthy word to be kept locked in the darkness of her own mind and heart. It was.
“… and hitting.” She whispered at last. I wished she would look at me, wished I could see her eyes and tell her that everything would be fine, even though it wouldn’t. Nothing could ever be fine when we were both too broken to be fixed, when we had too many holes in our shredded hearts. But I still wished.

There was silence then, except for the creaking of the swings we were sitting on. The twilight shrouded us in lengthening shadows as I studied the girl with curiosity. She couldn’t be more than six or seven years old, her small hands gripping the chain of the swing until her knuckles whitened, as if afraid to lose herself if she let go. Her blonde hair hung down her shoulders and seemed untouched by the wind that swept through the playground. She still had her head turned to the left, away from me, but I could see her pale cheek in the fading sunlight. She reminded me of myself, like a melancholic ghost from my past clinging to the reality of my sorrow.

It would have been a beautiful summer evening but for the silence that was too thick, hanging like threatening storm clouds over our heads, and the memories that pressed too heavily on my chest. My lungs failed to cooperate; I couldn’t breathe and felt the world tilt on its axis. I looked down and gripped the swing harder in my aching hands and dug my bare feet into the cold sand.
She finally looked at me then, her gaze burning into my down-turned head. But fear unlike anything clenched at my throat and I suddenly didn’t want to look at the girl.
“Why?” her voice was brittle and innocent and sounded like nails against a blackboard to my ears. I couldn’t stand it.
“I –” the words turned to ash in my mouth and I wished away the damned tears that burned like poison in my eyes. The maelstrom of emotions threatened to swallow me whole where I sat battered and vulnerable and so utterly lost.

I knew what she was asking, of course. Why all the rage and hate? Why all the screaming and fighting and desperate tears? Why did it almost always go too far? Whywhywhy? Why couldn’t they love like normal people? Why couldn’t they be a family like any other? I had asked myself the same questions for a long time, did so even to this day. I didn’t have any answers – it seemed I never did, even after twenty one years. I took a deep breath, tried to ease the pressure on my chest. The scent of summer rain hung in the air and I looked up at the girl at last. The stars bled from her hollow eyes like acid, burning deep furrows down her pale face and I knew I must have looked the same.
“I don’t know.” I whispered after a moment, nothing more than a soft breath shifting the air between us. She nodded again, this time in understanding, accepting her existence for what it was. For what it always would be. We looked out over the playground and fell into silence once more.

I was the lucky one, if you could call it that. My younger sister even more so since she had been far too young to remember. My brothers were the ones that got the worst of it, and my mother of course. I don’t even know what they were fighting about half the time, but dad would lose his temper so easily and it made us all terrified of him. What was he capable of?
The sight of my mother being dragged across the floor in her hair, while screaming for him to stopstoppleasestop, would forever be etched into my memory and haunt my every thought. Even now I could barely stand to think about it, it tore me apart like shards of glass in my veins and I didn’t want to face who – what – my dad really was. What he could be again.

The girl’s soft voice broke my painful reverie.
“I remember it too.” She said, echoing my earlier statement. I looked at her with desperate sorrow as she continued, “I think it’s my worst memory, you know.” She said matter-of-factly. Her haunted, fathomless eyes locked with mine as she unclenched one hand and reached out to grab one of my own. The girl seemed to change her mind mid-way and took hold of my sleeve instead, uncertainty written across her face for the world to see. But the world didn’t see, it never did, and for the first time that evening the girl in front of me truly looked like the child she was.
“I know,” I forced a smile, “mine too.”

Somehow, despite everything, a large part of me forgave him a long time ago. And it made me feel sick, because how could I ever have forgiven something like that? Forgetting was a different matter altogether; I would always remember that part of my childhood. They probably believed that I’d forgotten, that I had been too young realise what happened. Fools.

A tug at my sleeve made me look at the girl again; she was gazing at the night sky, where the stars had coloured themselves too brightly.
“Do you think,” she began in a breathless whisper, “that if I swing high enough and then jump, that maybe I can fly to heaven?”
I glanced at her, took her cold hand in mine and smiled, “I think I will fly with you.”

We would swing high enough to embrace the moon, fly past the Milky Way and the stars and beyond the infinite horizon of the Universe, all the way to heaven.