This is the English winning article from the creative writing competition, InkIt, written by Rtr. Pasindu Gunawardhana. Enjoy!

“The phone rang. “ Hello, ” I said , “Hello”. No one was there. I hung up. All the lights went out within seconds of the call. I got all the confirmation I needed. The QRT(1) team would bust through the door any second now. I have to get a head start if I want any chance of not getting arrested tonight. So, you might be wondering who I am, or maybe that quote from Peter Griffin might come to your mind; “ Who the [redacted] starts a story like that ?”. Stick with me as I tell you the story from the very beginning. I promise everything will make sense in a while. You’re safe with me . Unlike some others in this story, I’m not a psychopath, I promise.

I won’t be telling you my name at this time. It’s not important to our journey. I’m a nobody.

This story begins a long time ago. I was the first-born son in our family of four. Even though I say “first born” I was only 19 minutes when my younger sister was born. Yeah, if you couldn’t tell we were twins. Our mother was a stay-at-home mom, and our father worshipped the bourbon. He was a mean drunk. I was oblivious to the hostile atmosphere inside our house, but my father put an end to my ignorance one faithful day. I had just come home from a training for the state’s math competition and my father had just come home after working the whole day in court. He was a lawyer. I don’t remember what I exactly said, to set him off, but he beat the scrawny 13-year-old me black and blue. If mom wasn’t home that day, I don’t think I’d be here to tell this story. Over the course of the next 4 years him beating me would become a regular occurrence, and I would get used to it , vowing to myself that I’d never grow up to be like him.

Everything changed around 6 months ago, when my father had an accident while driving my sister back home from her dancing class. He lost control of the car and crashed into a wall at high speed instantly killing him. My sister survived, barely and had to be admitted to the ICU at once by the paramedics. We lost her two weeks later to intracranial hemorrhage. I read her autopsy. Even though my dad passing away meant no more beatings for me or mom, I also lost my life long best friend. My mother never recovered from that incident. I never saw a smile on her face after my sister passed away. But she did everything she could to make sure I had the best life possible. She always walked me to the bus, made me soup when I was sick, and she never laid a hand on me like my father did. 

I felt like I was finally starting to heal from those undiscussed emotional scars that I hid deep in my psyche when disaster struck again. I was in school at the time. A detective came to my classroom and asked the teacher who I was. I was then taken out of the classroom into a deserted corridor. “Your mother has been murdered. She was the victim of a robbery gone south. She was physically assaulted and had a heart attack.” It’s been 2 weeks and I still don’t remember how that conversation ended. Same as my sister’s: I read the autopsy. Those animals that robbed her had broken every bone in her legs when she refused to give them her money and jewellery. In the end they hadn’t even taken the things because people started rushing to that alley when they heard my mother cry for help.

They found her gasping for breath and on the way to the hospital she lay to sleep forever. I don’t I’ll be able to look at an ambulance for the rest of my life. The police brought in two undergraduates for questioning. Even though there were multiple eye witnessed of them fleeing the scene the police let them go citing insufficient evidence. All 6 of the youths who lived in the dorm as the accused were brought into the station but none of them were

Arrested. The next day the city went back to normal. The yellow tape was removed around where the incident happened. The chalk outline washed away. And the morning after the next day they were questioned, all 6 of them boys were found murdered in their beds. Someone had broken into their house and cut them up in their sleep. Of course, that’s what the newspaper said. One would wonder, how did none of the boys hear those earlier unfortunate victims screaming? 

Well, if I had to take a guess, I’d say the vigilante who killed them cut their tongues off before he killed each one so they wouldn’t scream. I’d say their knees were then shattered with a sledgehammer or cut with a knife so they wouldn’t be able to escape. Maybe the killer even interchanged between the two for the sheer fun of it . Maybe the killer sat down and watch all of them slowly bleed out to death after he put a metal rod through their ears. But that’s just a wild guess. Mom always said I had a very visual imagination.

You remember how I told you I wasn’t a psychopath in the beginning of this narration? I’m not so sure anymore . Maybe, because I still have the box cutters that I used to cut the brakes of “a car” 6 months ago. Or maybe, because I have a metal rod with 6 different samples of gray matter on it. But it’s anyone’s guess, isn’t it ?

(1) The quick response team ; a unit within the police.

Edited and published by: RACSLIIT Editorial Team 2022-23