Forever

Andrew Zhang, Year 7

I fixed my gaze onto the blood on the wall in front of me. The metallic smell of it filled the air and engulfed my lungs. It slowly dripped down, rubbing a stain across the cracked plaster, filling every gap, once yellowed with age, with a new fresh colour of crimson red. No matter how much I tried to take my eyes off it, they stayed glued on, not budging a single bit, not moving an inch. My body stood deathly still, as if I had become a statue. The clock struck an hour to midnight, but the ringing of the rusty bell was completely lost to my concentration on the blood. I followed a droplet as it plummeted to the ground, its shape slowly changing as it fell through the air. The moment the tip made contact with the ground, the world around me shrivelled up, and went black.

The world was spinning, and my eyes couldn’t seem to concentrate. I sighed in relief as the dizziness slowly disappeared. And then, all of a sudden, the impossible happened. I found myself staring into my brother’s eyes. My little brother. My everything, who had died ten years ago, only a toddler. His eyes, emotionless, stared back into mine, and didn’t even blink. In tears, I ran up to him, and wrapped my arms around him. But my arms only went through him, and his eyes only followed me. It was like he was an illusion. I slumped against the wall, not realising that the blood was dripping onto my back.

A hand suddenly wrenched me by the collar and pulled me up to my feet, which were now shaking from misery, confusion and surprise. I slowly turned around and stared into my mother’s eyes. Unlike my brother’s, her eyes were softer, but not as soft as they used to be. She looked me in the eye.

‘Dawn, it wasn’t your fault. It never was.’

I tried to get rid of the lump in my throat, but it seemed it would never go away.

‘Listen to me. I need you to take care of your father. That’s all I could ever ask from you. He’s broken. And, Dawn, always take care of yourself. Don’t let what happened to us happen to you.’

Suhanayan Piratheepan - Year 7

I nodded, despite not really understanding what she meant.

That’s when I went back to that moment, that moment my life had fallen apart. When my mum had saved me from the speeding car, pushed me out of the way and onto the footpath. When a crimson red pool had stained the dusty grey tar of the road, and left a runny track on the grooves of the rubber tyre. I remembered staring into my mother’s unmoving eyes, trembling in her limp body. I remembered holding my brother’s hand, spending the last few minutes of his life next to him. He had died a toddler, not knowing what the pain was, or what it would lead him to. But I knew, and mother knew too. As the sirens of the ambulance flooded the area around me, I blocked them out. I wanted to cherish these last moments, keep them close to me. Forever.

That’s when I snapped back into reality. My mum and my brother weren’t in sight. The crowd of people weren’t in sight. The speeding car wasn’t in sight either. Everything had disappeared. Except for one thing. The voice telling me it was my fault. I knew mum would have wanted me to move on, and forget about the past, but I never truly could. Deep down, I knew I was the one to blame. The blood on the wall, dripped down my back and onto my arm. Tears slowly formed at the edges of my eyes and made their way down, doing nothing but making me more regretful by the second. The blood dripped onto my fingers, staining my skin and leaving a sickly cool sensation that seemed to last forever. And when the clock struck midnight, I realised the pure truth. The blood was on my hands.