Silas
Screaming fills my ears. My dear sister, shouting for mercy, as our mother has her tied to a fucking bed.
Helpless. She knows there is nothing that can save her.
The realization isn’t lost on me either.
I can hear her pleas for help as Mother is heating the knitting needle for what is to come.
Correcting a sin. That’s all Mother cares for.
Correcting our sins. Even if those sins she is correcting are mere delusion.
They exist in her reality alone. Conjured by insanity, no doubt.
But how can you reason with a woman who believes in religion so much that even hurting her own children seems like justice?
Who would do that to the humans they raised?
The ones they sat beside when they were sick.
The ones they protected from a bad nightmare.
How do you go from protecting your children to causing their terror? What type of person is that?
I am cuffed to the foot of the bed, too far out of reach to comfort her. Too helpless to save her. To save myself. I can’t do anything but stay here. It’s pointless. Every effort to escape had failed long before Mother brought Sage into the room.
Her cry for help breaks my heart. I can’t bear hearing her scream and struggle while I am bound to stay in place and witness my life drift away.
Every chance of happiness. Every dream of escape.
All are about to vanish in just a few hours.
The only person in this world I will ever love is about to die just because she loved me back.
And with her, our unborn child. The one glimpse of happiness we ever had in a life of misery.
If it’s a sin to create a new life, why isn’t it a sin to end it?
Why correct a sin by committing another?
“This baby is a sin,” Mother repeats over and over again like a broken record as she approaches Sage.
My sister’s hands and feet are tied in a way that leaves her exposed, with her thighs open, waiting for a home abortion appointment with mother dearest. One none of us asked for.
Consent is not a concept in this house. Choice isn’t either.
It’s just Mother’s word or nothing. A lesson we both learned the hard way.
Sage wants this baby. I want this baby. Mother won’t hear a word.
In her mind, her kids committed the ultimate sin they could have done.
Incest. Our unborn child, the one we see as happiness, she sees as the devil’s spawn born from our forbidden love.
How could a precious new life be a sin? Can’t she see that this isn’t reality?
She is so deep in the delusion of her perfect little family that she can’t see the children she believes should behave a certain way aren’t the ones she birthed.
I am trying to figure out a way to free myself and help her, but the damn handcuff is firmly closed around my wrist and doesn’t want to let me go, whatever I do.
I am trapped. Forced to watch as the love of my life and my child are about to die.
She won’t survive. I know she won’t. Not unless I find a way to help her.
I focus my eyes on the mirror facing the bed.
There’s a crack in the glass from when Mother pushed Sage’s head against it.
She fell to the floor and cracked her head open.
A small scar is still present on her right cheek, right under her eye, where her face collided with the mirror.
Under the mirror and on the vanity, there is the metal cross.
The one Mother used to mark her inner thighs after she heated it on the stove for every sin she ever committed.
That was her punishment. If she lied, she would be burned once. If she missed her curfew, then three burns just in case she sinned on the way home. And so many more. The list is endless.
My punishments were always different from hers.
Starving for days. Locked in the iron closet in the basement until I couldn’t fit in it anymore.
After that, the punishments stopped. It was around the time I reached sixteen years of age.
When I finally learned how to play the game and appeared as if I were going by Mother’s rules, Sage never quite figured it out.
Even when I tried to save her from the punishments, she still got the worst of it.
And now she is about to endure the ultimate punishment.
Just because she made the mistake of loving the boy the world told her is her brother.
“Mother, please,” Sage pleads as Mother forces the needle inside her. A scream of agony fills the room, and I close my eyes, trying to mentally silence what is happening around me. But it’s pointless, because even with my eyes closed, I know exactly what is happening.
I can feel it in my heart as Mother snuffs out the light of the life we created with the tip of the needle. It makes me want to scream, to fight, yet I stay still. Because staying still seems like the only option. What else could I do anyway?
Sage is already a goner. She won’t survive this.
She won’t come out of this standing, whatever I do.
Who would? Trauma roots inside you in many forms, but some things you never get over.
You’re never the same again. And even if Sage survives tonight, she will never be the girl I fell in love with.
The sincere girl who smiled and helped everyone without a second thought.
The one who trusted with every cell in her body.
She always saw the good in people, but how is she going to keep doing that when no one protected her from this terror?
“Stay still, girl,” Mother instructs before she digs further inside her. “This is your fault. Ungrateful kids. I gave you everything,” she mumbles as she continues prodding my sister with the needle.
Everything. That’s an interesting way to put it.
She speaks as if we chose this. As if we had any choice.
I want to speak up. I want to shout in her face that this is all her doing.
She is the reason we found each other in this world.
The reason we exist as we are. It was all because of choices she made.
Yet we have to pay the price for it. We have to suffer through losses and terror just because she wanted a life that only existed in her head.
Sage screams louder, and I hope someone has heard her by now and called the police.
But I know deep down no one is coming. They didn’t come when she locked me in the basement.
They didn’t come when she burned Sage every night.
And they are sure not coming now that my sister is about to die.
Her blood will be as much on them as it is on me.
Everyone is responsible for this. Even Sage herself, because loving me was a choice, too.
I open my eyes when the room is finally quiet. Mother’s religious chanting is the only sound in the small space. Sage has passed out on the bed. Blood soaks the mattress. So much blood. I barely reach her foot with my fingers and whisper, “Sage?”
No answer. I try to listen for her breathing and watch her chest for the slightest movement. Anything. But she is still, and now I am convinced she is on death’s doorstep.
Mother steps away from the bed, leaving Sage there.
She walks out of the room, taking the cross from the vanity with her.
I don’t need to ask what she is doing to know that she is preparing to cleanse Sage of the sin she disposed of.
The one that soaks the bed now in blood, oozing from my sister’s womb like a river of crimson.
I pull at the handcuffs again. Nothing moves. There’s not enough space to pull my hand out. The chain won’t break. This is pointless. I am doomed like my sister. No one is coming to help us.
I am about to give up when a faint sound comes from the bed.
“Silas?” Sage’s voice is barely a sound. She is still alive. She won’t survive unless I do something. There’s so much blood around her. The metallic smell fills the room; I can almost taste it in my mouth.
I pull my hand as hard as I can, with all my strength.
The metal handcuff scrapes my skin, blood droplets running down my arm, but finally, I hear a bone crack, and my hand is free.
I keep myself from screaming. I can endure it.
I can endure the pain if it means saving her.
Mother has just gone downstairs to get what she needs to cleanse Sage of her sins.
I heard her mumbling the moment the abortion she performed was done.
I don’t have much time. I don’t have any time. I need to act quickly.
I pull on the fabric of the sheet until it shreds. I take the piece and wrap my hand in a makeshift sling to help minimize movement as I help my sister. But even if I manage to get her down the stairs, we are going nowhere with Mother still there.
Realization dooms me. There is only one way to escape. I go to my sister. I brush the hair out of her face and kiss her lips softly. “Stay here. I will be back,” I whisper to her almost lifeless form. I don’t wait for an answer. There isn’t one coming anyway. She is barely alive.
I go to Mother’s chest in the corner of the room. I try to open it, but it’s locked, and the key is always around her neck. I look around the room, and the only sharp object I can use to pry it open is the discarded needle that was just used to end the only hope of redemption we ever had.
I decide in this moment that it is all or nothing, and even though I want to stay as far away from the blood and this dreadful object as possible, I force myself to approach it.
I kneel on the floor and pick it up. My fingers press on the exact spot our Mother’s fingers were not even an hour ago, when she used it to stab my unborn child and end their life before it even began.
I let Sage’s screaming—still playing in my head like a sound from a horror movie that has deeply traumatized you and that you will never quite get over—fuel my anger as I approach the chest again.
I push the needle into the lock and move it in every direction until I hear the metal snap and the chest open.
I push the top open. I kneel and start throwing old clothes and sheets onto the floor until I find what I am looking for the gun Mother keeps hidden.
I take it in my hand. I have never used one, but at this moment, I don’t care. I will either kill her or die trying.
I slowly walk out of the room, giving one last look at Sage, who has either passed out or died—making all this for nothing.
I don’t stop to check. Because if I do, I will give up the only opportunity for revenge.
The only opportunity to take vengeance for what was paid for in blood.
I don’t realize how I walked from Mother’s bedroom to the living room and continued walking until I am facing Mother’s back, as she is heating the cross to cleanse my sister. I am not going to let it happen.
“Mother.” She turns at the sound of the title she chose for herself—one that is only a word and never felt real.
“Silas.” Her eyes fall on the gun. I expect her to panic, to react, but she does none of that.
She falls to her knees, hands brought together, as she starts praying out loud.
“Lord, forgive my children for their sins,” she starts, and I am not going to stay here while this woman pretends she is a fucking saint, deserving to ask for our forgiveness.
I press the trigger. A loud noise fills the house, and blood splatters on the wall behind her. She falls to the floor lifeless, with a bullet in her head and blood spilling onto the floor. I walk over her body. Saliva gathers in my mouth, and I spit on her face.
“You should have asked Him to forgive your sins, Mother.”