Less Children

A street light shone, somewhere, not too far away, sending little pieces of light through the thick rain. Water hovered its way to the pavement and jumped a bit up. The night, loud with the rain that seemed to be smiling, seemed empty. The streets were close to vacant, except for one arena, where the musical noise brought thousands of teenagers into a sober ecstasy.
A girl, looking so much alike all the other teenagers around her, was struggling to have a phone conversation. “Mom, I’m at the concert! I cannot hear you! Please, leave me alone, I’ll be home after the concert!” she screamed into the phone, and shut it to place it in a bag, another messenger bag just like half the crowd owned.
A few minutes later, she couldn’t ignore the constant vibrating and ringing her phone made, seeming ignorant to the noise and the crowd, strong on the decision of being heard. The girl grabbed the phone, flipped it open to find that a text message had been received. “Come home now. Curfew was up an hour and a half ago. I’m worried, come home. Mom.”
The girl remained immobile, the only figure in the crowd not ecstatic and moving along with the music. With a sigh, she made room between the sea of sweaty, happy people and out of the arena, leaving that unbelievable bliss of hearing the music of her favorite band behind.
She resolved to go past her mother’s unfair demand of having her home, and leaving her friends at the concert without a word. The rain fell heavily, but, somehow, joyously. She found entertaining, as she paced the streets on her way home, thinking of the concert she had just attended. She was happy. She had a happy life. Her mother wanted her home because she loved her. She had good friends, nice, loving parents, a good situation at school and a comfortable life, financially. Her family loved her and did the world for her happiness and well-being.

Firm steps made a few splashes behind her. The speed of these steps increased with every second that passed by, signing her sentence, without her even knowing it. The bliss in the girl’s mind stopped her from feeling any danger, even from hearing much, in fact. But when a man put a hand over her mouth from behind, all bliss was erased from her mind as if there had never been such a feeling. The man, who seemed to be tall, and awfully strong, violently pulled her into him, and, hand still over her mouth, he picked her up and took her to some kind of basement. He threw her to the ground with a strength she had never suspected would exist in a man. The basement room was small, and putrid, because of the humid air that made it hard for the girl to breathe, soaking wet as she was. A buzzing sound was the only thing she could hear, beside the rain that fell, as blissfully as ever, outside. A light-bulb, grey with dust, and hanging from the ceiling, was rocking from side to side, sending a decent amount of light into the little room. The man got on top of the girl, pounding his weight on her, bringing her close to suffocation. Her rejection angered him, causing him to slap her hard, a few times, over the face. Scarlet, runny, and gross, blood emerged from her nose and her lips, making her almost choke on it. She instantly hated the metallic taste that had invaded her mouth and felt the most helpless she had ever felt, realizing that no matter how hard she would scream, no one would hear.
The man had a monstrous face, a bestial gaze, and the kind of breath that makes a peculiarly loud, scary noise. A large scar dominated his face, from under his eye to the end of his chin. His body was impossibly heavy to bear for the poor girl, who was screaming desperately, as he ripped her clothes. She punched, scratched and pushed with all her strength, but nothing stopped the beast from what he was doing.
Countless punches and slaps had turned the girl’s pretty face into a bloody surface, wet with rain, blood and tears. Pain seemed to peak at every second, as that horrible man violently raped her.
It seemed like decades before he stopped, panting, as the early light began to show itself from above, into the small windows. The girl had fallen into unconsciousness hours before, and woke up, as she felt cold water splashed all over her. The man picked her as if she were a dirty cloth, and took her up into the street, abandoning her into a lugubrious, dirty back alley.

Sophia opened her eyes. It was those moments, those hours spent in hell that had turned her life around by an angle of 180 degrees. All the happiness that had ever existed turned into bitter regrets and pointless questions that invariably started with “what if”. What if I didn’t leave early? What if I told someone?
Such questions she asked herself, gazing down at a round, growing belly, where a child with no fault in the world grew. A child fathered by the most horrible monster a young girl like Sophia could have ever imagined before she met him, and met him hard.