formed in my belly. A loud smack sliced the air and Momma hit the floor. Her eyes found mine and I gasped. Tears fell through my hands as I kept them tight over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream loud. Her hair covered her face and the bad men mustn’t have seen me because she shook her head just slightly, silently telling me not to move. A man with fancy brown shoes walked into the room over to my mom.
A loud shot sounded and I flinched. Warmth trickled over my legs and my pants became soaked. I cried in silence. Another shot hurt my ears and I squeezed my eyes closed to shut out the world. Maybe if I could make it all go away in my mind, it wouldn’t have really happened. Maybe it was just a bad dream, like the ones I’d been having. But as I reopened my eyes my mom’s lifeless ones stared back at me and her whole body was stiff. She was staring at me as if she couldn’t see me. As if I was not there looking at her from under the bed.
No, Momma.
I screamed in my head. My heart broke. She was dying, but the men were still there. I stayed frozen in my spot until a few minutes later when the last of the footsteps disappeared from the room. I thought they’d all gone but they hadn’t. When I poked my head forward, crawling out for Momma I stopped when I got a glimpse of a man’s face before he shut the door with a loud bang. I waited a few more seconds, my heart thundering in my ears but heard nothing but silence so I crawled out.
“Momma?” I whispered as every bone in my body shuddered together. My eyes bulged at the thick red blood pooling around her. I trembled forward and fell onto her.
No. Momma, wake up.
Sharp pain hurt my body. I shook her shoulders but she didn’t move or make a sound. Tears filled up my eyes and blurred everything in front of me until all I could see was red. On my hands. On my pants. All around the two of us.
It hurt too much. I doubled over and laid down beside her with one arm cradling her body and my face, resting on the cold hard floor. Maybe if I stayed here and held her, wished hard enough for her to hear my cries she’d curl her arms around mine and tell me what she always reminds me. ‘It’s you and me, baby. We’ll always be okay.’
My shoulders bobbed with every sob until I became so tired from crying, my eyes began to close. With every blink, they closed for longer until I fell asleep and didn’t wake until a familiar voice soothed my soul and my cheek.
My eyes flicked open to the sad face of my grandma, my momma’s mom. My limbs felt heavy as Grandma lifted me up from the floor and held me to her chest.
“Beth you gotta take him away. You need to get out of the city. They find him. They’ll do to him what they’ve done to Catherine. I’m not gonna let that happen.”
His voice echoes in my ears as the memory fades where it always does, despite how hard I try to remember who owned that voice or remember what came next.
Repressed fucking memories.
My doctor told me I’ve unconsciously blocked out memories from before, during, and after the event, because of the trauma I suffered when it all happened. I did it without knowing and for years I remembered nothing. Over time, little things had begun to trigger flashbacks. Sometimes it was a smell or something someone said just like my mother. Slowly, moments of my life I’d lost were returning. But they were all just pieces to a puzzle I can’t make sense of, or finish. The very first time I shot my gun in weapons training at the academy I remembered a few vital moments of that night. I remembered his face. The one who blew two slugs into the back of my mother’s head. I remembered his fancy fucking shoes and the smugness in his features as he walked out of my mother’s bedroom. From that day forward, my goals were set. I’d make Giuseppe Marino pay for his sins. For the hurt and treachery he’d brought upon me, my mom, and so many others.
Laughter overtakes my mind and I twist my head and see a