The room was fuzzy towards the edges but that wasn’t any different from normal. Hecate peaks out from behind the bedroom door upon hearing her father yell and the resulting scream from her mother. This was not unusual either, her father’s yell or her mother’s screams; what was unusual was that her mother had stopped screaming and that her father had paused in his yelling. Hecate quietly and quickly snuck around the edge of the bedroom door towards the kitchen. She knew which boards to avoid on her silent trek to the kitchen and soon enough Hecate was facing the old moldy kitchen. The scene before her took a second to register in her mind. Her mother was on the floor, blood spreading out from around her head in a halo while Hecate’s dad looked on in silent horror.

Hecate took a step towards her mother, her vision swimming as she took in her mother’s figure on the floor. Her skin was deathly pale and her hair was matted with blood. Everything seemed to slow down until time was frozen. Another step and another brought Hecate closer to her dying mother, whose eyes were blinking slower and slower. Hecate’s father was still stuck in place by shock. Her mother tilted her head as she heard Hecate approaching and waved her down. Hecate knelt at her mother’s head to hear her final words though she didn’t know that yet. Her mother opened her mouth and let out a strangled cough, then closed her mouth and grimaced in pain. Hecate saw drops of water land on her mother’s face. Up until that moment, Hecate hadn’t noticed that she was crying. A choking sound brought her out of her mind as she focused back on her mother. Hecate’s mother raised a hand to cup Hecate’s face.

“My sweet sweet girl. I may not have been meant long for this world but I don’t want you to drag my death along with you. I want you to know that I-”, her confession was cut short as her heart stopped and her hand grew cold.

Hecate let out a loud sob and grabbed at her mother, pulling her to Hecate’s chest. Hecate’s loud sob seemed to have broken her father out of his shock stilled state. He started screaming at her but she couldn’t hear a word of it. Enraged that she wasn’t listening to him, Hecate’s father stomped over to her and tried to drag her off her mother’s body. Hecate refused to let her go but her father was much stronger than she was. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled Hecate off of her mother all the while she was kicking and screaming. Hecate struggled against her father until she was able to bite him then she raced back towards her mother.

Her father recovered quickly and sent a sharp kick into her side, kicking her away from her mother’s corpse. Hecate let out a shriek as she curled up into a fetal position clutching her stomach in pain. Her father raced over to her in an attempt to shut her up but managed to step on her mother’s corpse before reaching Hecate. She recoiled as if she was the one who was stepped on before letting out an earth-shattering scream. Hecate’s father stopped all of a sudden and began shaking violently. He started screaming at Hecate to stop but she couldn’t hear him over the power of her scream. Her father’s eyes widened as blood began to pour from them. Hecate couldn’t stop screaming, she was so angry, so frustrated, and so sorrowful that she couldn’t have stopped screaming even if she wanted to. Her father came rushing towards her, blood seeping from his pores before he stopped stunned then exploded from the force of Hecate’s scream.

Finally, the screaming stopped as Hecate lay curled up on the floor covered in the blood of her parents. She rocked herself back and forth for hours. That’s how the police found her. Covered in the blood of her parents, rocking back and forth, and unresponsive. The police only found the body of the mother and assumed a villain had come in and attacked the place. Hecate’s uncle was found and she was handed over. The case sat untouched for years until it was ultimately forgotten.