It was around midnight. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed awake until that hour – or maybe it was meant to be – I can’t really explain. It was just another Friday night – well, not any Friday night, but the last day of my 11th grade. I had waited so much for vacation, but now that it came, my life seemed duller than ever. So, as I was saying, I had nothing left to do for a long while now, so I decided to turn on the TV and look up for something that could catch my attention until I fell asleep.
The soap-opera I usually watch had finished two hours ago – what would I do now? Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching news on the TV, so I decided to move on to the first channel I could find that talked about any news at all. After a minute or two of switching from channel 001 to 125, I finally found something to watch; on channel 126. It was about a murder that happened at that exact Friday. It had been one hour ago, and the strangest part – it was very close to my home – about twenty minutes by car.
“Just a coincidence,” I thought to myself. How very wrong I was.
Not too long after I found that channel, my father arrived home. He behaved strangely – couldn’t spell a word correctly and kept talking faster than I could understand. Something was wrong – I could feel it. This proved to be correct when I spotted a red liquid on his fingers.
“Is that blood? What have you—“ I asked as directly as I could.
“It’s nothi…” he replied nervously, his fingers trembling (just like the rest of his body).
After an answer like that, I had no courage left to ask any other question. What was my father hiding? Why would his fingers be covered in blood? Would the police come over and arrest him? I could not help but think of all the possibilities that would explain all of this. Still, the one that kept knocking on my head was that my father had just murdered the guy that I saw on the TV.
Thirty minutes passed since I asked father about the blood. One hour. More twenty minutes. I could no longer wait for a divine answer; I had to find out an explication to all of this coincidence. But before I had gathered enough courage to approach dad one more time, mother arrived home.
Not very different from father, she was acting different from her usual way. She barely said a word to me. She headed straight to father’s room and closed the door. Locked it would explain it better. I know this because I tried to open the door, with no success. Attempt to listen to what they were saying was the last thing left for me now.
“You don’t think they—“
“Can’t say…”
“We have to…”
“Leave right away.”
This was all I managed to listen behind the door. But as I heard the word ‘leave’, mom opened the door and told me to get a few clothes and be ready to leave in fifteen minutes. This was the proof I needed to convince myself that my parents had just killed someone and were trying to flee from the police. I could not think well after that. I had so many questions in my head that trying to speculate an answer just brought more and more questions. I can’t remember much about that night after that. The biggest surprises were still yet to come in the next few days.
Chapter I - Unexpected news
It was around midnight. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed awake until that hour – or maybe it was meant to be – I can’t really explain. It was just another Friday night – well, not any Friday night, but the last day of my 11th grade. I had waited so much for vacation, but now that it came, my life seemed duller than ever. So, as I was saying, I had nothing left to do for a long while now, so I decided to turn on the TV and look up for something that could catch my attention until I fell asleep.
The soap-opera I usually watch had finished two hours ago – what would I do now? Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching news on the TV, so I decided to move on to the first channel I could find that talked about any news at all. After a minute or two of switching from channel 001 to 125, I finally found something to watch; on channel 126. It was about a murder that happened at that exact Friday. It had been one hour ago, and the strangest part – it was very close to my home – about twenty minutes by car.
“Just a coincidence,” I thought to myself. How very wrong I was.
Not too long after I found that channel, my father arrived home. He behaved strangely – couldn’t spell a word correctly and kept talking faster than I could understand. Something was wrong – I could feel it. This proved to be correct when I spotted a red liquid on his fingers.
“Is that blood? What have you—“ I asked as directly as I could.
“It’s nothi…” he replied nervously, his fingers trembling (just like the rest of his body).
After an answer like that, I had no courage left to ask any other question. What was my father hiding? Why would his fingers be covered in blood? Would the police come over and arrest him? I could not help but think of all the possibilities that would explain all of this. Still, the one that kept knocking on my head was that my father had just murdered the guy that I saw on the TV.
Thirty minutes passed since I asked father about the blood. One hour. More twenty minutes. I could no longer wait for a divine answer; I had to find out an explication to all of this coincidence. But before I had gathered enough courage to approach dad one more time, mother arrived home.
Not very different from father, she was acting different from her usual way. She barely said a word to me. She headed straight to father’s room and closed the door. Locked it would explain it better. I know this because I tried to open the door, with no success. Attempt to listen to what they were saying was the last thing left for me now.
“You don’t think they—“
“Can’t say…”
“We have to…”
“Leave right away.”
This was all I managed to listen behind the door. But as I heard the word ‘leave’, mom opened the door and told me to get a few clothes and be ready to leave in fifteen minutes. This was the proof I needed to convince myself that my parents had just killed someone and were trying to flee from the police. I could not think well after that. I had so many questions in my head that trying to speculate an answer just brought more and more questions. I can’t remember much about that night after that. The biggest surprises were still yet to come in the next few days.
Edited by Lu Xun