I saw him for there on my way home through the mist. He was shivering and he could barely talk through the chattering of his teeth. I saw his form and knew instantly what they'd done. I took off my velvet green school blazer and draped it carefully over his naked malnourished form, mindful of the angry welts and black bruises.

I sat him down in the kitchen. Mother wouldn't be back till dinner and Father... Well, Father would never be home again. He winces slightly as he sits down but I turn and ignore it, favoring the motions of putting the kettle to boil and retrieving the tea things, cake tins from the overhead cupboard. I set the food in front of him but did not linger to see if he ate. Running to the bathroom upstairs, I run the water into the tub and ran back down again. "Let me see." I said quietly. "Please let me see."

He tilts his head up and I brushed the dirty rusty brown caked bangs from his face. I sigh. He sports a black eye and a cut on the lips. The healing gash on his cheek had reopened and a thin trail of red made a trail of a bloody tear. Inside me I felt anger, frustration, disgust and utter helplessness well up. I kiss the top of his forehead quickly as to not frightened him. I know he doesn't mind, but it bothers me.

How can family be so cruel towards each other?

He didn't have a name for himself save the vulgar words that his father throws at him. I called him Yan and he liked it. He couldn't have had been any older than 12, but he was already as tall as my 16 year old self. When we first made aquintance, he'd been cowering under the rose bushes my mother had mooned over but I had patiently watered, nurtured and cared for. His bright grey eyes stare at me from the darkness of the bush. "Who are you?" I asked, noting in my guts that this boy should be approached to like a wild animal. And I was right. He was hurt, I could see that his light blue plaid shirt was dotted with blood. I said nothing, but merely crouched down and stratched out a hand. He looked at it warily. After awhile, something in his eyes clicked. He sensed I meant no harm. Hesitantly, he placed a cold hand in my sweaty and clammy summer ridden one.

It had been a routined. Every single time, he would come to me after his father was tired with him. He never uttered a word, but I knew he was able to read. I had taught him myself. Every single time, dutifully, I would clean his wounds, dress them, give him something to eat, read to him or let him share the book with me. Come dusk and he'd be off again. Back to his father. And the next time, the cycle would repeat itself. The wounds much worse, the cuts deeper, the bruises darker. He'd wait for me under the rose bush, unfailingly. I'd never told anyone about him. I'd not even trust myself to write it down. Though I'd went to the Confessionals last Sunday and told Father DeClan about him. I could hear the old pastor breathe in the space behind the screen, but I knew he had put it down to my childish imaginations. Adults. When that got to that age, they think there is logic and reason for everything.

The bath water was quickly stained a light shade of pink-the kind you got when you mixed too much water with your strawberry juice. I soaped his hair and begun from there. Today it was worse. The weren't only belt markings and cuts and bruises. There had been a trail of deep red blood that flowed and dried between his legs and there was a cake of dried semen on his abdomen. New bruises in the shaped of hands adorned his side. It looked as if whoever had made them had held him from behind and it only added to the fact that his backside was also bruised like a flower that centred around his hole. The thought made me sick. I must've been trembling because he took my soapy hands in his warm ones and kissed them. "I'm so sorry..." I whispered, the words tumbling out before I could stop it. Tears were beginning to swim in my blue eyes. He placed his hands on the tub edges and used them as leverage. He made sloshes of water on the blue tiled bathroom floor when he came up and kissed me.

I didn't fight him. Nor did I stop what happened next on the wet floor.

We continued our ritual after that, pretending everything was normal when it was not. As usual, I sat next to him with my book. Yan stopped me, shaking his head. Instead he pulls me on top his lap and we read Jane Eyre together. I took in his newly shampooed hair, his still soap scented body that still had traces of the slaves that I had applied on him. I drank him in as the late afternoon sun illuminated the tiny kitchen space we were in. I ran my hand against the fabric of my father's shirt that I'd nicked from the attic. I memorized the way the damp brunette locks fell across his eyes as they screwed up in concentration. I traced every cut, scar, bruise on his face, lips and neck... Oh, his neck! Brushing my lips ever so softly against the warm milken skin, it begun again what we had started on the the bathroom floor.

I had a strange foreboding feeling in my chest. The kind that old people could tell that there was a storm coming, the kind that mothers could sense with that their children were not well. It was a dull and heavy thing that choked me from the inside. As he stepped out into the growing twilight, I wanted to scream and beg him to stay and let me take care of him. Forever. I wanted to pledge myself to him. I was aching to cling on to him and never let him go.

"Yan." I let the word roll out. He turned back at me. Smiling for the first time, it was like the sun had suddenly come out from its sleep. He kissed me and whispers, "Thank you." Stepping off the step, he walked off to the edge of the forest and let the darkness envelope him completely. I didn't know how long it was that I'd stood there. But when my mother came home, she found me in a featal position, curled up as if in pain by the back door.

I wish I could say that the foreboding sense was wrong. I wish I could say that I'd seen him again, bloodied but alive. But the truth of the matter was that I never saw him again. Not in this lifetime at least.

Labels: Short stories