My throat, once again, grew dry when I heard my dad's voice. A big ball of unwanted emotions swelled up inside my chest, mainly anger and sadness. I didn't want to turn and face him. I didn't want to waste my breath speaking to him.
He was already doing that with me.
But I defied my conscience anyway and reluctantly turned around. He stood smiling, as if nothing was wrong, and took a step towards me.
I took a step back.
"What's wrong, Sweetheart?" he asked with utter confusion, his smile fading. I felt the need to slap him. To go against everything I'd learned about respect for elders. I wanted him to feel my emotional pain, not only about us moving, but by him and Mom not bothering to listen to my reasoning.
I felt they were ignoring me.
"Dad, don't stand there and pretend. You know what's wrong," I said. "We can't move. We can't just... abandon our home!"
"But, Honey... we're not abandoning our home. I promise that after we move, you'll see that there's nothing to worry about! Everything will be okay."
Now I knew for a fact he wasn't listening to me. I wasn't worried about moving; nor was I scared that things wouldn't be okay. I just wanted to stay home.
I tried to calm myself with a deep breath and turned back to a box of Daniel's old toys. Dad was silent behind me, probably still trying to find something else to say. I decided to make that easier for him.
"You don't understand..." I mumbled. "Can you please just... leave me alone?" The words came out harsher than I had planned but for right now, I didn't care. Although it was wrong of me to want Dad to hurt, I couldn't help myself.
My emotions always came out stronger than anticipated.
After a few long moments of silence, I finally heard my dad's footsteps go down the stairs. Somehow, I could hear the grief they carried with them.
I tried to push the bad thoughts out of my head, along with the worries bubbling up inside. If I let those things consume me, I'd never get anything done.
***
After I'd packed up all of Daniel's old toys and then Lilly's, I got to work on everyone's clothes (the ones that weren't already in bins).
Rummaging through the ol' junk we had, I came across a few family albums that were filled with pictures of family vacations, birthday parties, Christmases, and even random pictures of us around the... house.
The house.
Staring at the pictures didn't help at all. It just made me realize even more that we had memories built up inside these walls. So why get rid of them?
The albums, along with the other junk I'd collected, were thrown into an empty box, carrying a part of my remembrance with them.
I pushed that box to the far end of the attic.
As I got to work, things started to look neater and more boxes began to pile up near the stairs. I of course came across more things that brought back too many memories and did my best to hide them amongst the less painful things.
Albeit it being cold, lugging heavy boxes actually made me a bit warm... hot actually. I wanted to slip off my hoodie but knowing the temperature up here, I'd probably put it back on in no more than five minutes.
But I pushed through and finally came down to two boxes stacked in the corner. They were a bit heavy, at least heavy enough to make me take careful steps. I could hear glass clanking together inside which meant whatever I was carrying was fragile.
And Mom would kill me if I dropped it.
So I peered over the top of the second box, making sure I didn't bump into anything (although I had already cleared a path). To me, it was logical to put everything near the stairs so when we did pack this stuff up, we wouldn't have to keep going back and forth from both ends of the attic.
Coast was clear for a good three steps before the toe of my shoe struck something hard and thin. I stumbled for balance, already having my heart stop beating. But as my other foot pointlessly scrapped the floor for traction, I tripped over my left one and began a quick fall forward, hearing glass break before I even hit the wooden platform.
Shards went everywhere as I hit the floor... hard. A piece of glass cut through the skin of my palm and another through the fabric of my hoodie and into my shoulder.
I hissed in pain, almost screamed when I sat up to my knees and another shard sunk into my upper shin. I quickly removed the damaging glass, pretending it was a difficult bandaid, and brushed away the remaining shards that had scattered around me.
My mind immediately flashed to the guarantee that Mom was going to kill me for breaking whatever was in those boxes. But then my thoughts switched over to whatever the heck I tripped on.
Last time I checked, there was nothing in my path.
I turned around, gripping my bleeding palm and alternating between gripping my shoulder and shin. I was too stubborn to get bandages right away, thinking the pain was no big deal.
It hurt, oh God did it hurt, but I was more curious about what kinked my walkway rather than my own safety.
Talk about curiosity killed the cat.
My eyes scanned the floor in a frantic pattern of left and right. At first, all I could see were plain wooden planks, nothing too flashy.
But then something caught my attention.
Oddly enough, the hard, thin thing that caused my pain was just some dumb old nail, partially rusted. There had been boxes piled on top of it when I first came up so no one would've known to fix or remove it.
I struggled to my feet, curious to see if I could somehow get rid of it to avoid anymore injury. But as I took another step, something sharp pierced through my foot and the sole of my shoe.
I yelped in pain and slammed my back against a rafter, quickly reaching down for my foot and turning it over.
Another shard of glass.
"Dammit..." I pulled the piece out slowly, hissing in pain again as it slipped from my flesh and out of my shoe. The shard was hurled into the pile of glass a few inches away as my anger barreled up out of nowhere.
This time, I was more careful when limping over to the nail, checking the floor for any stray shards that may want to pierce my skin even more.
Coast was clear this time.
I dropped to my knees beside the nail, placed two fingers under its head, and began tugging slightly.
It didn't budge.
I tugged harder and when it didn't work, even harder.
My effort increased five more times before I finally heard a small creek erupting from the plank the nail was hammered into. After one more yank, I was (at first) thankful I had a result.
But my relief was washed away when I realized the whole plank had been removed from the floor.
The whole plank.
My mouth dropped open when I thought about how Mom was going to kill me for damaging the floor. About how I was probably going to get whacked in the head with the same plank I was holding.
I set it off to the side and stared at the dark hole I had made with wide eyes.
"Oh no, no, no!" I whispered, trying to see how I could possibly fix it before Mom noticed. The part of the floor I was sitting on was just over a spot where two rooms met, meaning I hadn't necessarily created a hole in the ceiling, but it didn't keep the worry from boiling up inside me.
I brushed my dark hair back with a bloody hand. Today was just not my day.
I began scrambling to put the plank back in place again before something caught my eye.
Something I wouldn't have noticed if I weren't sitting close to it.
There was the small outline of what seemed like a book sitting in the hole, although I didn't the think the hole was that deep. But truthfully, I couldn't even see the bottom of it since this side of the attic was darker than the other.
I reached my good hand into the hole reluctantly, silently praying that nothing would bite my fingers off. Things weren't really looking up for me at the moment.
A quick "thank you" escaped my lips when the tips of my fingers touched the hard cover of the book safely. I pulled it out into the light and brushed off the layers of dust covering it, coughing at the clouds that sprouted in my face.
I focused my vision on the cover and what I saw left me in utter confusion.
Symbols. Just... symbols. There were some words but none of them in English. The symbols were mainly strangely shaped stars, squiggles, and a few circles acting as borders.
I slipped a finger vaguely in the middle of the numerous pages inside, flipping the book open and coughing at the dust that continued to rise.
More symbols, now appearing as some sort of foreign spiritual stuff, covered the two pages I opened to. I scanned over the words inside that were also written in some kind of foreign language, and flipped to the next two pages.
I gasped at what was on these.
Someone had doodled drawings of frightening creatures with razor sharp teeth and half naked bodies. Some had more detail than the others but it made the others no less scary.
One drawing in particular was a creature with extra pointy canines biting into the neck of a young, naked lady. Another was a different creature but with similar teeth eating a human arm.
I thumbed through the next few pages, feeling sick at my stomach, and soon came across drawings of some kind of magical men and women. They stared down with beady and angry eyes at people begging on their knees who were also drawn naked, unlike the magical people. They appeared to be waving their hands at the nude, and in the next set of drawings, all of the beggars were either dead or turned into some kind of animal.
My heart pained for the people in the drawings, even if they weren't real.
What had I gotten my hands on?
I continued to flip through the pages, finding numerous drawings of symbols, foreign language, and more drawings of magical people and cannibalistic creatures.
I was beginning to wonder if Mom or Dad had known this was here, and if they did, what it meant. Mom was a religious woman so I wouldn't expect her to have something like this that looked like... like... devil worship.
I gulped hard when I had enough of the contents of the book and set it off to the side. I wanted to hold onto it though, since I was still curious as to why it was in our attic in the first place.
I was about to put the plank back when something else caught my attention.
Another, smaller book which, once I picked it up, appeared to be some kind of journal but with very few pages.
The cover was leather and when I opened it, there was some kind of brownish coin, bronze maybe, taped to the inside.
I ignored it for now and skimmed through the first page of the journal that was actually written in English.
The first thing I noticed was the name Eliza; my great-grandmother.
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Okay guys! I PROMISE the next chapter will be far more interesting! Just getting those details in. Stay awesome! ;)
-Ash