Page 2 of Juniper Unraveling

Whispers drift through my mind, tales I’ve heard of the men in black suits who steal away children and kill their mothers, and I realize I’m staring at a nightmare I’ve thought as nothing but a campfire story.

They step toward my brother and me, grabbing our elbows much harder than even our father did whenever we disobeyed.

“Mom!” I twist out of the grip, and my brother lets out a wail, when one of the soldiers lifts him.

Spinning on my heel, I turn to my mother, who’s backed herself and Sarai into the corner of the room. She crosses her arms over the front of my sister and closes her eyes. I recognize the movement of her lips as the Lord’s Prayer from the many time’s she’s mouthed it in silence.

“Mom!” My muscles lurch with the yearning to run to her and get caught in that embrace alongside my sister, but another grip, much harder than before, bands around my neck, and I gasp as it yanks me backward.

My hands fly to my throat, and pressure builds in my head and nose, banishing the air in my lungs. Scratchy material scrapes against my chin, as the soldier drags me across the room by my neck, leaving one soldier in the bedroom with my mother and sister.

My sister’s cries are wild and throaty, not like a whine, but when she’s really scared.

Once, she dreamed of monsters, and woke with that same scream in her throat. Only my father could calm her, when he promised her he’d never let a monster hurt her.

I thought it odd at the time that he never said they weren’t real.

We come to a stop just outside the bathroom, and the same pop I heard before is much louder, bouncing against the walls. Another.

My brother’s cry fractures into a screech beside me, and I still in my captor’s arm, double-blinking.

It doesn’t even register at first that they’ve shot my mother, not until I see the red spill across the wooden planks like a river, moving toward me as if reaching out for me.

A third pop.

A narrower stream of blood trickles alongside the first as the two race toward me.

A sharp pain hits my chest, which is cold and tight, the air thick in my lungs. I open my mouth to nothing. Nothing but silence and the tug of my throat that begs me to cry.

Why can’t I cry?

My mother and sister lie in a heap on the floor. The way they’ve fallen, they almost seem curled into each other, peacefully asleep. An eternal embrace.

And that’s how I know that my mother’s gone, because she’d never let anything happen to the twins. She was as protective as a mother could possibly be.

Their forms blur behind my tears, and the cry that erupts from my chest isn’t my own. It sounds foreign to me. Weak. Scared. The most painful sound I’ve ever heard crashing inside my head.

The noise around me shrinks away to echoes bouncing against my skull.

I reach out my hands for my mother, hoping there’s one glimmer left, one small movement that tells me she’s still alive. That she and my sister are playing.

Nothing.

My mother drifts away from me, as I’m dragged through the room, but I don’t take my eyes off her. I kick and dig my heels into the hardwood. The arm banded around my neck is close enough to my mouth, and I clamp my teeth down on it, surprised when they merely slide off the impenetrable fabric. I fight for one more moment with my mother. One more look to remember her eyes, the same bright blue as my sister, Sarai’s.

“Let me go!” I hear myself scream, but everything is distant, like someone else speaking.

Around the corner, both my mother and sister disappear from my view, and my brother’s cries bring me back to focus. The living room slips past my periphery, and my mind begs me to take something. Anything.

On the coffee table is the book my mother often read to us before bed. Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. In her time, it was a favorite, so when my father pulled it from his satchel after one of his excursions, she danced through the house with excitement.

Against the pressure across my throat, I reach out for the book and clutch it tight to my chest.

The monster holding me pries at it, but I wrap my arms tighter until the fight relents.

And perhaps the other monsters catch on, because one of them offers my brother a stuffed rabbit lying on the floor. It belongs to his now murdered twin, Sarai, and though it tones down his screaming some, his body still jerks with hard sniffles and sobs.

A tight fist of shock twists in my stomach, as the monsters march us down the stairs of the apartment where we live, farther away from my mother and sister.