Chapter 1 - Blood on the Floor
I found my eighteen-month-old niece crying with a red-stained abdominal dressing.
Her grandmother pulled at the outer gauze.
Her aunt held both of the child’s arms away from her stomach.
Her crying was sharp and breathless.
The red stain beneath the gauze was the only thing I could look at.
One woman kept working at the dressing.
The other kept those tiny arms pinned away from it as if my niece had no say in what happened next.
I moved first.
I pulled my niece free, brought her against me, and covered the bandage with a clean towel before either woman could touch it again.
I wasn’t trying to win an argument.
I was trying to put one layer of fabric between that eighteen-month-old child and two adults who would not leave her dressing alone.
Then her grandmother hit me beneath the eye.
The blow turned my head.
Before I could recover, my niece’s aunt drove my collarbone into the chair rail.
The skin above my cheek opened.
Pain shot across my chest.
The bruising there began turning deep violet while I was still trying to keep my niece protected against me.
I would not put her down.
Blood ran down my face and soaked the front of my collar.
When one knee finally hit the floor, it collected beneath me in a dark puddle.
Spilled juice had already spread across the same spot.
The two liquids streaked together in red and orange beneath my knee.
Three scratches along my forearm kept bleeding into my palm.
I grabbed the towel to steady myself, but it quickly became clumped and dark.
My cheek burned.
My chest hurt every time I tried to straighten.
Through all of it, I kept my niece close and the towel over her abdominal dressing.
She was the reason I stayed upright.
Her grandmother was still close enough to reach us.
Her aunt was still close enough to grab again.
I had blood on my face, blood on my shirt, blood in my palm, and a child against me whose bandage had already been disturbed once.
Then my brother came in.
He saw his daughter first, safe against me, still protected by the towel.
Then he saw me on one knee.
His eyes dropped to the dark puddle under me.
He saw the streaks of spilled juice running through it, and the front of my collar soaked red.
He didn’t need anyone to explain what had happened in that room.
He struck his mother.
Then he turned toward his sister, caught hold of her, and dragged her away from me and his daughter.
I stayed on the floor holding the child against my chest.
The room went dead silent for a fraction of a second.
Then I noticed a shiny metal object slip from the aunt's pocket and clatter onto the hardwood floor.
May you like
It wasn't a medical tool.
It was a heavy, silver switchblade.
