The Lining Is Silver
001: Drunken Lullabies
There’s something telling about the battered, bruised and broken body of a toddler that makes it through the night. The rumours spread that they never should’ve made it through. The destruction caused to a child’s body, especially done by the hand of a parent, one who helped create such a miraculous piece of life—as they say, what goes around comes around, or some such notion.
When a mother is so frantic she’s short of breath and frazzled beyond reason because she cannot even fathom that her own husband, a man she vowed to love for better or for worst, deliberately and nearly killed her own flesh and blood. Her hands are shaking with adrenaline to the point that even sitting does nothing to calm the jitters coursing through her as the doctors and nurses crowd around the small body on the gurney just inside the room she’s not permitted in.
She can only stare at the wall in front of her and jerk at every door that opens to her left, hoping that it’s a nurse or doctor coming from the room her little child is in telling her the news that it’s going to be okay.
It finally comes, three and a half hours later; if she were drinking she’d be considered three sheets to the wind but she’s that hopped on nerves and despair that all she can focus on is the slight upturn of lips from the doctor, the arm around her shoulders from the nurse and the constant murmur that her child survived—her child is still alive.
She falls to the floor with all an encompassing guilt; the signs were there, they always are. Isn’t that what all the ads from magazines, the papers and the television programs tell her? The signs are there with big, flashy, neon arrows, telling all the world to look at me! Yet they’re never noticed till it’s too late, she remembers the ads mentioning that too. She’d have never known if she hadn’t forgotten her best pair of cutting shears—something about being a stylist and that lucky pair of scissors. If she had known…if she had known…
When a mother is so frantic she’s short of breath and frazzled beyond reason because she cannot even fathom that her own husband, a man she vowed to love for better or for worst, deliberately and nearly killed her own flesh and blood. Her hands are shaking with adrenaline to the point that even sitting does nothing to calm the jitters coursing through her as the doctors and nurses crowd around the small body on the gurney just inside the room she’s not permitted in.
She can only stare at the wall in front of her and jerk at every door that opens to her left, hoping that it’s a nurse or doctor coming from the room her little child is in telling her the news that it’s going to be okay.
It finally comes, three and a half hours later; if she were drinking she’d be considered three sheets to the wind but she’s that hopped on nerves and despair that all she can focus on is the slight upturn of lips from the doctor, the arm around her shoulders from the nurse and the constant murmur that her child survived—her child is still alive.
She falls to the floor with all an encompassing guilt; the signs were there, they always are. Isn’t that what all the ads from magazines, the papers and the television programs tell her? The signs are there with big, flashy, neon arrows, telling all the world to look at me! Yet they’re never noticed till it’s too late, she remembers the ads mentioning that too. She’d have never known if she hadn’t forgotten her best pair of cutting shears—something about being a stylist and that lucky pair of scissors. If she had known…if she had known…
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Hello readers...if there are any of you! :) This is something I'm diving into blindly, so if you're going to stick it out, you're brave!It's a small and slow (and probably boring) start, and for that I apologize. However, I know the next chapter will definitely pique your interest as it's in the child's POV and years down the road from this chapter.
The rating is due to the content which will undoubtedly occur in later chapters, as I'm known for having a rather morbid and detailed imagination and the topic of abusers in this story is obviously a heavy one. DO NOT TAKE THE RATING LIGHTLY. I cannot express that enough.
That being said, I've never been one to withhold updates if I don't get feedback, I'm not going to start that now, however, if you like it, hate it, whatever, feel free to tell me. I'm open to all sorts of feedback EXCEPT those stupid chains people tend to post in comments. Those are not reviews/comments/feedback and they waste my time.
I write to write; obviously I've been a bit MIA on here in a while, been on FF.net as of late, but thought I'd give this original fic a shot. We'll see...and eh, nope, most of my a/n's are not this lenghty, just an fyi. ;)