#seercull

The trance was broken by Mama starting up the vacuum cleaner, the motor drowning out the representative’s monotone reading of names and where they came from. Papa was noisily folding up a newspaper and sipping at the last of his morning coffee before getting up to go get more from the kitchen. She moved when Mama came into the room, jumping off the carpet and onto the couch and pretending the floor was a great chasm and the vacuum, a dragon at the bottom guarding its sacred treasure. Finally, a reprieve from the depressing turn of the morning television. They were already on Arrest Number 83 in their district and showed no signs of stopping.

Mama picked up on the game fairly quickly, chasing her young daughter about in slow and lazy circles with the vacuum cleaner, making sure she didn’t miss any spots even though the dragon was clearly demanding revenge for some heinous crime that had yet to be discovered. Only once the living room had been cleaned did the game end, the final arrest on the list going by and with a reminder to be a good civic servant and report on criminal stalking activity, the announcement ended and the screen changed back to animated wonderment.

The vacuum on its way down the hall, the floor was safe again to sit on, and she did, watching with childish glee as the highly-stylized wolf on-screen went through his usual shenanigans to unsuccessfully catch his rival, a seemingly-naive purple sheep. Mindless entertainment, Papa called it, but he never saw fit to actually change the channels or tell his little girl to stop watching it, so maybe he secretly liked it, too. That was her logic and it made plenty of sense to her.

Right on cue, Papa came back into the living room with his second cup of steaming coffee and flopped back onto the couch. He shook his head as he watched the show a few seconds. “Mindless entertainment...” Just like routine dictated. But it was a comfortable routine and she liked it well enough.

Mama was finished with the vacuuming and was winding up the cord, Papa was halfway through his cup of coffee, when the doorbell rang. This wasn’t very unusual, it might be the weird neighbor lady who always seemed to have an issue with them and who regularly came to complain about the noise during the day. It might be one of Papa’s friends from work, or Mama’s friends from around the block. Nothing told her at first that this was a strange event in her daily life, until the person on the other side of the door started banging on it instead. It caught her attention and she curled up into herself in the middle of the floor as Papa stood up to go answer the door, Mama following at a short distance with a confused and worried expression on her face.

She didn’t know what she was expecting. All she knew was that one second, Papa was at the door and the next second was chaos. He yelled something back toward Mama, drowned out by harder bangs and splintering wood. She couldn’t understand it, but she knew it sounded panicked and the realization that Papa was scared in turn scared her. Mama, however, understood it well enough and ran out of the room like a shot, grabbing her daughter’s arms to haul her to her feet and pull her toward the back of the house.

Her questions were drowned out by a loud bang from the front of the house and a cacophony of voices shouting and yelling and sounding very threatening, even if she couldn’t understand them through the panic-induced ringing in her ears. There was more banging from the front and glass shattering somewhere in the house, stomping heavy footsteps coming further in, and the thought that they would get to her and Mama finally scared her into tears.

The sounds of struggle and pursuit were muffled as soon as Mama made it into the back bedroom, shoving her child around the door in order to shut it and lock it. It wasn’t a very good lock, just enough to deter an ambitious and mischievous eight-year-old from coming in and little else.

She stumbled to the floor when pushed, unable to make her legs do what she wanted them to do. The sounds of men in the hallway coming closer and in more and more numbers made her start to sniffle, Mama grabbing her a bit roughly by her upper arms.

“Quick! Get under the bed and try not to make a sound.” Mama told her, as calmly as her own quivering voice would allow. Her eyes were foggy and wet, also welling with tears. She was trying to hide it though. “No matter what you hear or see, you will not make a noise and you will not come out until I tell you to.”

She wanted to protest, like any slighted child, but the troubling bang against the bedroom door caused her instead to scurry for cover, as Mama had said. Her tiny frame fit neatly under the bedframe, and she scooted as far back as she could go, curling around herself more for comfort than any active attempt at hiding better.

Mama was already around the other side of the bed and clicking the locks on the window open, putting her weight against the frame to make the old swollen wood give way. It scooted loudly, loud enough she could hear it under the bed, above the second blow to the door that tore it off-kilter on its hinges so it banged against the wall and landed partially on the floor within sight. Lines of boots, she lost count of how many, stormed into the room. Mama let off a sort of shrieking roar that she had never heard the woman make, and it startled her so bad that she had to cover her mouth and lay perfectly still so as not to make a sound, like Mama had told her to.

There was a loud short struggle that moved the bedframe enough she was afraid of being uncovered before Mama was dragged to the floor, wild-eyed and raging as a feral animal. For a brief moment, their eyes met and it seemed to calm her for a second’s time before she was restrained and dragged shrieking curses and still struggling with an anger her daughter had never seen before in either of her parents down the hall and out the front door. There were noises for some time, shouting and yelling and horns and rumbling engines that faded away.

The house was silent in only the ways a house ravished by a cyclone is silent. There was an ambient creak as the wooden floors and old walls settled after their sound beatings, almost deafening. The sounds, noises she had lived with all her life, spooked her now. She jumped at them and remained where she had been left, watching down the hall for anything that might have been left behind. She hoped and prayed for at least her Papa, wishing to see him come running to her and pull her out and hug her and tell her they would get Mama back, like heroes in a television show. But part of her also knew that if anyone was left in the house, she didn’t want to meet them.

It was hours before she felt safe enough to exit, following the call of her stomach and bladder. Slowly, she emerged and padded quietly down the hall to the bathroom, stopping every so often to listen, a set of instincts kicking in she never knew she had. With her first stop taken care of, she moved through the rest of the house, ignoring the devastation as best she could. Ignoring the front door blown against the kitchen table, trying to ignore Papa’s broken glasses on the kitchen floor, trampled beneath so many boots next to the shards and dark stain that had been his coffee cup and what was in it.

The fridge was smudged and scarred, but intact, and though she tried to ignore it, she couldn’t help but wonder why. Why had it happened. Was it because of the daily announcements that interrupted cartoons on a weekend morning? The more she thought on it, the more upset she became and the less and less hungry she was feeling. She had to find them, so said her child’s resolve. Mama and Papa weren’t bad people, she could explain that. They took good care of her and they went to work and they paid their bills on time when they were due and they followed the rules. They weren’t bad, they were good people.

They would look for her if something happened to her. She had to look for them. The logic made sense to her.

She was careful to avoid the broken slivers of television screen scattered across the freshly-vacuumed living room floor, running to her room to prepare. Getting dressed, finding her school backpack, and filling it with things of comfort and food, she deemed herself ready to begin her journey.

There was no crowd outside the house, like one would have expected for such a disruption. That was not how things worked here; if your house was raided, it was avoided by the neighborhood like the plague. She met no resistance as she left, wasn’t offered any help as she ran down the street with fire in her stride to save her parents. No one approached her or saw her. She was alone in the world, entertaining thoughts of what a reunion would be like, wild imaginings to help her cope with the daunting task in front of her and the traumas she left behind.

It would be almost three days before she realized she didn’t know where to actually start.