All the times I tried to run, I never made it past the pond. God knows how much I hated my house, especially in the winter when the darkness moved swiftly over the snow banks, leaving me a prisoner in my room. Boxes neatly stacked in one corner next to my twin sized bed left little space for me to maneuver around in and the small window above my bed let in a few rays from time to time, but it was never enough to make it feel like home. It was essentially just a place to sleep; no posters of my favorite band on the wall, no TV and video game setup that I could pass the time with, just a clean empty space and bare blue walls. Something about that pond though always held me close – ageless and deep, the last hope for salvation buried in its mirrored darkness.

There’s this one time in particular I’m thinking of. It was just about mid-January and I was in my bed, reading a book I had been working on for my English class, trying to get a little bit ahead like usual. Mom wasn’t home from work yet, and Stacy was making dinner for us that night. Nothing too complex, since she had only recently begun to make meals on her own; I’m pretty sure it was tacos that night. Regardless, the food was almost ready when my Dad stumbled in, throwing open the simple cherry red door at the bottom of the stairs with a theatrical flair. He was obviously drunk, aside from the fact that he leaves work at three and could’ve been home by three thirty if there had been traffic and it was now seven, his glazed eyes, unkempt hair and smoky demeanor said it best. Hearing his brutal ascent upward towards the kitchen, I ducked out of my room down the long hallway to try and fend off some of the flak Stacy would undoubtedly receive for not having dinner on the table.

I didn’t get there quick enough and I heard the screams from both sides, flatly resonating through dead air. When I got to the kitchen, she was on the floor, curled and crying on the dirty white tile with him standing over her, several chairs scattered and overturned in his wake. As he started to pull her up by the hair, I ran in swinging knowing that I didn’t have a chance. I thought about her. I thought about steel beams, ancient granite, thought about having hammers for fists, and most importantly, I didn’t think about anything. I just acted. My punch hit him in the jaw, flesh cracking against hard bone, and sent him back into the sink. That was all the time I could give her and she knew enough to run. I cocked back for another salvo, hands sweating and thought about why I didn’t grab a ceramic plate off of the table, still neatly set with a snowflake tablecloth and silverware.

My nose was broken and a stream of dark red sprayed across the stovetop as I went down. I was screaming; flailing around on the tile like a fish on land, legs kicking chairs, shins, oven doors – anything so long as I could stay conscious. There was a parting shot to my ribs I couldn’t see coming through closed and blackened eyes, and I heard my father panting loudly, the air above me thick with whiskey and hate. It was several minutes before I tried to get up, and I assumed that he had retreated down the hallway to pass out. Crawling by memory, I found my downcast coat near the porch door and gathered myself on a kitchen countertop. Opening the door, I scrambled out into the deep, wonderfully brisk air and felt the snow pushing itself against my wounded face like a protective mother.

The hundred yard trek normally wasn’t too tough to make, but considering the weather, my blood encrusted face and my freshly swollen eyes, it was almost five minutes before I reached the clearing. Clean, unspoiled snow covered everything dead and gone, branches on the outskirt heavy with winter and I thought that this would make a great postcard; a boy standing alone in a snowy clearing, the inky mirrored water next to him, an enraptured scream escaping his lips, wanting nothing more than for the icy embrace of winter to take him and pull him close. Stacy probably would’ve ran to the neighbor’s house about 200 yards in the opposite direction, and Mom wouldn’t be home for at least three more hours. I’m not religious by any means, but I never imagined Hell as a burning inferno of darkness and demons. Hell to me was always a lonely desert of ice, where you could walk forever in any direction and you’d always be bitterly frozen to the core. But you would never freeze to death out there, and you could never lie down to rest; you just kept moving nowhere. The weird thing is, Heaven was the same thing; you were free from everything, the air was so cold it would freeze cleanly in your lungs, and there was no one that would spoil the spotless landscape, not even you, because the snow would be sinking quietly like a graveyard. I thought about all those things and smiled to myself, congealed blood cracking sweetly on my lips as the empty echoes of silence rang out across the still January water.