THE DAYS THE WINDOWS CLOSED
718 Words
The Diary of Silence
Chapter Four — The Day the Windows Closed
The day everything changed began like every other day.
That was the cruelest part.
The windows were open.
Sunlight poured across the floor in long golden strips. Her mother was in the kitchen, arguing playfully with a pot of stew.
“You cannot rush flavor,” she muttered.
Her father was searching for his keys.
“They were right here!”
“They are always ‘right here,’” her mother replied calmly.
Amara sat cross-legged on the floor drawing their mango tree with a crayon that had worn down to a stub.
Normal.
Ordinary.
Safe.
Her father finally found his keys in his jacket pocket and lifted her chin gently.
“After school, we’ll stop for ice cream,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Even if I get math wrong?”
“Especially if you get math wrong.”
She giggled.
Her mother walked her to the gate like she always did, adjusting her collar, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead.
“Big girls stand steady,” she reminded her.
“I know,” Amara smiled.
Her mother watched until she turned the corner.
She always watched until she turned the corner.
The Call
School ended early that day.
Teachers were whispering.
The principal’s face looked tight and pale.
Someone called her name.
Not gently.
Not the way her parents did.
She was taken to the office.
There was a man there she didn’t recognize.
A uniform.
He knelt to her height.
His mouth moved slowly.
There had been an accident.
There had been a crash.
There had been no suffering.
She didn’t understand at first.
Crash meant something broken.
Broken meant fixable.
Her father fixed things all the time.
But the adults in the room weren’t speaking in fixable tones.
The world felt like it tilted slightly.
Just slightly.
Enough to feel wrong.
The House That Evening
The windows were closed when she arrived home.
Closed.
That was the first sign something was truly wrong.
The house felt smaller.
The air heavier.
Relatives filled the living room, whispering, hugging each other.
No one hugged her at first.
They looked at her the way people look at fragile glass.
She searched every face for her parents.
They weren’t there.
She walked to the kitchen.
The pot was still on the stove.
Cold now.
Untouched.
The drawing she had left on the floor was still there.
Mango tree.
Three stick figures.
She picked it up slowly.
Someone finally knelt beside her.
An aunt, distant and tearful.
“They’re with God now,” the woman said softly.
Amara frowned.
“But they’re supposed to pick me up.”
The room broke into quiet sobs.
She stood very still.
Big girls stand steady.
So she did.
The Funeral
She didn’t cry at the funeral.
That confused people.
She wore black that felt too tight around her neck.
Voices around her blurred together.
Gone too soon.
Tragic.
Such a beautiful couple.
She stared at the closed caskets.
Closed.
She hated that word now.
Closed windows.
Closed doors.
Closed boxes.
Someone held her hand, but she didn’t know whose.
She waited for her father to step out from behind the tree and say it was a joke.
She waited for her mother’s laugh to break through the quiet.
It didn’t.
The Silence
That night, the house made no familiar sounds.
No humming.
No low conversation.
No music.
The silence was thick and suffocating.
She lay in her bed staring at the ceiling.
Storms pass, her father had said.
Pain changes, her mother had said.
She waited for either of those things to be true.
Instead, she felt something new settle inside her chest.
Not sharp pain.
Not yet.
A hollow.
A space where safety used to live.
And somewhere deep down — though she couldn’t have explained how — she felt something else.
The world had shifted.
Not by accident.
Not completely.
There had been tension in her father’s voice the week before. A late-night argument she wasn’t meant to hear. A name mentioned in frustration.
Her uncle’s name.
At eight years old, she didn’t connect the pieces.
She only knew this:
The windows never opened the same way again.
And childhood ended on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
- Writer
- chap_listContents
- likeADD