The Days Of Hellfire

Chapter Six.

ALEK GRAYSON had lived a semi-normal childhood.

He learned to walk when he was eleven months old. He learned the unexplainable joy of smashing and banging his mother's favorite, and very breakable, objects against the floor at the tender age of three. The year he turned five, he attended school for the first time. He played nice with the other kids, shared his snacks during snack time like a good boy, and learned his alphabet with as much difficulty as the next child. He played in the mud with the other youngsters during recess, and ignored the girls in class just as they ignored him.

At the age of seven, he tried to set a fire cracker off on his own on the fourth of july, and that resulted in him almost blowing his hand clean off his arm. He hadn't understood that he was supposed to place the firecracker down on the ground before he decided to let freedom ring. That was also the first time he took a trip to the hospital. He figured out fairly quickly on that day that he did not enjoy hospitals.

At the age of eleven, he had faced his first racial slur. A boy who was much larger than he was had asked him if he and his family ate dogs for dinner. He didn't understand what the boy had meant then; it had been a much simpler time and he had been so native that he couldn't comprehend what the boy was talking about. It was only when he went home and asked his mother and father about it did he fully grasp what the boy meant, and the undeniable wrongness of his words. Him being of Asian decent, Korean to be exact, in a place that had little to none diversity had left him subject to prejudice thoughts and racial slurs.

At the age of thirteen, when he'd started his transition from boy to young man, he lost his father. He didn't die- although that's often how Alek wished he went. It would have caused his family less greif that way. At least then, had he died, they would have mourned him and moved on. However, his father had not been so considering. He just walked out of he and his mother and his seven year old brother's life like they were nothing. He said he felt "flustered" with them, and that he couldn't phantom settling down anymore. He wanted his freedom. He wanted a new life.

"I'm not getting any younger," he had said to his mother, Tammy, as she cried and begged for him to stay. Before he'd made such a rash decision to leave, his mother and father had been arguing. She'd accused him of having an affair with the woman next door, and had made vain empty threats at him.

She screamed that she would leave him behind and take their kids with her. This had made his father angry, and it was then and there that he decided that he'd better leave now and not risk his mother leaving him later. When Tammy heard that, she quickly tried to persuade him otherwise. She cried and pleaded, saying that she didnt mean what she had said, but his fathers mind was already made up.

He and his little brother Ty were sitting at the top of the staircase listening to everything. He held onto his crying kid brother tightly as he himself tried to hold back his own tears.

"This is whats best for us. I need to make something of myself- I need to live."

"But you have a family, Jackson!" she screeched. "You have a wife and two kids. You have made something of yourself."

He shook his head once. "Come on, Tam, Don't make this more difficult than what it has to be. We both knew that this was a long time coming... Our marriage is going nowhere."

Alek's mother paled. Her beautifully porcelain skin had suddenly took on a slightly greenish shade, as if she were about to become ill. Her large almond shaped eyes stared at Jackson, not quite believing what he was saying.

"You think I gave you my everything so that you could just throw it all away?" his mother cried. "You think that I gave you my everlasting love and vowed myself to you before God just so that you could stand here and tell me that you want to leave your family behind? To leave your kids behind? For goodness sake, Jackson, listen to yourself!"