Torn Apart

It was a warm drizzly afternoon on the day Lily's parents were murdered.

Lily was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, softly humming a children's tune as she posted yet another picture into her scrapbook. She was a girl of eight years, with auburn colored hair and striking green eyes. She was far too skinny for a girl her age, but with a very pretty smile that was contagious to all who saw it.

The picture depicted a scene from the previous year at the beach. Her Dad was laughing maniacally as her mom mock-strangled him. Lily was sitting on her knees in the sand in front of them both, smiling prettily for the camera. Her hair was tangled and dripping wet from the ocean water. The top piece of her swim-suit was crumpled at the bottom, and the strap was straying down her left shoulder.

The little girl glued the picture down clumsily, missing the majority of the paper with her unsteady hands. Pulling back, she grinned at her collage of family pictures, which seemed to be growing at a rapid pace. One picture showed her sitting on her dad's lap in the kitchen, his arms wrapped lovingly around her. In another, her mom was pressing a kiss to her forehead, Lily sticking her tongue out in disgust; her uncle Henry with cotton candy glued to his upper lip, pretending it was a pink mustache and trying to kiss her. In the center of the mass of neatly arranged photos, lay a picture of the entire family at a gathering. The family on her mom's side wasn't all that big, with only four cousins, and three aunts and uncles, but they were the only ones who accepted Lily in the family. She had never met her Dad's family; nobody had ever spoken of them.

Downstairs, she heard the doorbell ring. She ignored it, her parents would go see who it was. The bell rang again; her Mom yelled.

“Hold on! I'm coming!” The sound of whatever craft she was working on clattered on the table. The door opened and then closed again, murmuring.

Lily jumped up from the floor, pressing her ear against the door. Normally, she wouldn't eavesdrop, she was taught better than that. Somehow though, this calling felt different, wrong, somehow.

“He has nothing to do with this anymore. Leave him out of it,” she heard. Even through the door she could sense a level of terror in her mom’s voice.

“Wrong, you're all wrong. You’re always a part of it. It hasn’t stopped, and it never will.” An explosion cracked the air. The deafening sound reverberated throughout the house, making Lily ram her hands to her ears. It was a gun shot.

Lily sank to her knees on the floor, trembling violently, still unable to remove her ear from the solid door. There were no more sounds coming from downstairs. There were no singing birds outside, any cars on the street rumbling by as they usually did, only the ringing in the young girl's ears and the sound of her heart pounding in her chest.

The sound of things clanking around in the kitchen broke the silence.

“Goodwin. What have you done?!” Her Dad ran into the kitchen hurriedly. “Karen!”

“You shouldn't have poked your nose into where it didn't belong.” He didn't sound angry, or even sad, but a serious calm.

“Where's Lily?” Lily jumped a little when her name was mentioned. “What did you do to my daughter?”

“I did what had to be done. An eye for an eye, that’s what they say right?” Another shot cracked deafeningly to the young girl's already muted ears. Then silence.

Tears flowed down Lily’s cheeks. What was going on? She was confused, but she was lucid enough to know that there was an angry man with a gun in the house. Heavy thuds sounded on the wooden steps like he was wearing steel-toed boots. He was coming up the stairs.

To the bed, she thought, she had to hide under the bed. Frantically, she crumpled to her knees to scoot under the bed but was blocked by several stacks of books and clothing that she had neglected to put away properly. Somewhere else then, she thought, and quickly.

In the spur of the moment, she shut herself in the closet, burying herself under a hoard of clothes and stuffed animals. Her breathing was painfully labored, she was terrified beyond comprehension.

The door slowly creaked open.