Chapter One: Violet Eyes.

The frogs must have swallowed pints of gravel before they began to sing their grave songs of the night; they gurgled as if they were drowning in the swamp water. The sound echoed off the thin walls of his room and kept him awake on his bed, staring at the ceiling with a bare expression. 

Gaige was used to car alarms going off at three in the morning; the drug dealers and mischief in the alleys next to his apartment. The thin walls crying and sobbing, babbling apologies as his step-father threatened to make another hole next to the picture frame; it was the last one they had left. The rest of them became shattered glass in garbage bags for the truck to pick up on a Thursday morning, while his mother made excuses for her violet eyes and the black streaks that rained down her pale cheeks from her petal lashes. All the bloody tissues hidden in those bags...

An eight-year-old boy who had never known silence before recently. The clean and quiet air that swept through his lungs and calmed his nerves. Yet he could not find sleep in the peace of his new bed, or home. The lullaby of unfamiliar crickets chirping outside his window in their tall bed of grass did not help him repose.

He kept listening for the closet door to unlock so he could find his mother with her open arms, so fragile with her spindly figure, but she would grab him up and hold him so tightly. She would not let him go this time, and for the first time in years she would genuinely smile at him. She would be strong.

But the chairs kept groaning against the tile, as the table banged back and forth, knocking against them in a battle of steel legs and shuffling feet. Anxiety hanging in the air, as heavy as the pounding of his tiny heart while he listened to his mother's pleas. 

"Just let us go!" She begged through raspy lungs. "We won't burden you anymore if you just let us go. Please, please?"

The man's knuckles bulged with his blue spider web veins as his fist clenched around her pencil wrist. "You're not f*****g going anywhere. You think anyone else would want you? You belong to me."

"Mom?" The footsteps were quick to escape out the rattling window and leave nothing but silence in their wake. Gaige did not receive any kind of response, but he heard a low burble as if someone were blowing bubbles of spit from their mouth in the other room. A few coughs sputtered out, and died just as quickly as they came. He kept trying to be hopeful. What else could an eight-year-old boy do? "Mom, are you out there?"

The places in the skull where the bones come together are called sutures. She had met the metal arm rest between the right temporal and parietal lobes, where a fracture was caused from the contact and force of her body being yanked back. He had listened to the paramedics whisper this through the cracks of the door as a river of red slowly trickled past their feet through the cracks of tile. He listened to the blood stick to their shoes as they clambered around her like vultures, picking at her skin and limbs. And then they gift wrapped her in a plastic bag to be shipped to the morgue. 

Gaige's mother never opened the door. When they finally found him frozen in the corner of the small closet space his face was pressed between the crack of cold plaster, where everything replayed over,  and over again in his head like a nightmare. 

And he laid in his uncle's house staring at the ceiling as the blood from her corpse began to seep through the cracks tracing to the cobwebbed corners, and he recalled how numb her eyes were as they stared at him from the keyhole.