Chapter One
I sat cross-legged on the lounge carpet, fingers tracing the shallow grooves between train tracks worn smooth by years of neglect and memory. The little red locomotive was ready to connect with railroad cars in tow—prepared to take off on its journey. Its painted eyes stared ahead—calm in a way that knew too much. As if it remembered a future I hadn’t lived, had already seen the end, and was only waiting.
I stared back, willing it to move—please—like that minor act of motion might rewrite everything about to go wrong.
But like everything else in this house, it refused to listen.
Stillness spoke first. Obedience followed like a hymn.
And in this house, silence wasn’t peace. It was a warning.
Outside, voices clashed again—another crescendo in the never-ending symphony of blame. The shouting rose and spilled through the walls like floodwater through a crumbling dam. Thin walls meant nothing stayed private—every syllable soaked through like smoke in old fabric, clinging long after the fire was gone.
“David isn’t slow,” my mother snapped, her voice brittle from too many battles lost to a man who never raised his voice until it cut the deepest. “He’s …”
“What?”
The words dropped like a gavel. His voice sliced clean through the plaster.
My so-called father.
He stood in the kitchen doorway, framed like a courtroom verdict—shoulders squared, jaw locked, a man carved from the granite that didn’t crack, only shattered what touched it. His navy suit strained across linebacker shoulders, more armour than clothing, a monument to control masquerading as refinement. Under the harsh overhead bulb, his hair gleamed like the roof of a hearse—slicked back with something that smelled expensive and aggressive, like ambition turned sour. As he turned, his silver watch caught the light—flashing like a blade, gaudy and loud, the shine that fools mistake for genuine power.
My mother orbited him like a dying star, wild in her momentum. Her bare feet slapped against cracked linoleum, every movement a clash between defiance and desperation. His deliberate and cold manner contrasted with her scattered and burning state—her sun-bleached curls defying her ponytail, her peasant skirt flaring around her thin, tired legs. Her yellow sundress had faded to the colour of old bones. Her collarbones jutted like wings held in too long, as if they still remembered how to fly even if she didn’t.
They didn’t match. Posture, presence, even the way they carried sorrow—it all belonged to different worlds.
His polished Oxfords looked out of place near her chipped purple toenails. His sharp sandalwood cologne clashed with the stale notes of vanilla, cigarettes, and something older—grief, maybe. Regret. Even their suffering spoke in different dialects.
“You need to face it,” he said, calmer now, which made it worse. That kind of calm was never peace—it was precision. “The boy’s defective.”
The air shifted. Buzzed. That word landed like metal against a live wire.
His mind stayed cold. Locked. Organised like a ledger that only registered loss. Nothing leaked out. No regret. No doubt. Numbers.
Hers burned—disordered, flickering, desperate. The heat of a woman trying not to burn through herself.
Defective.
The word slithered across my skin like something sentient, like it was testing me for a place to burrow in.
But I already knew.
Not because of what he said. Because I’d felt it long before.
At school, kids avoided me without knowing why, veering off like their instincts sensed something they couldn’t name. Teachers forgot my name before I’d even finished saying it, something in them pulling back without understanding the reason. I could hear thoughts—not as words, but as colours, rhythms, patterns pulsing beneath the surface of skin and silence.
And that was the problem.
My curse wasn’t what I lacked. It was what I couldn’t stop seeing.
He adjusted his cuff links, slow and methodical, as if that final click might settle everything into place. Though small, the gesture taught me early that violence isn’t always loud. Sometimes it comes dressed in quiet finality—like paperwork signed in ink, still warm.
“I’m done arguing. The court order—”
My mother laughed.
Not the laugh that meant humour. The kind that cracked open. The kind that sounded like something inside had finally snapped.
“Fuck your court order.”
She grabbed the vodka by the neck. Her bracelets jangled like shackles, turquoise clinking against glass. For one heartbeat—one long, suspended moment—I thought she might swing it at him. And a darker part of me, buried so deep it didn’t have a voice, hoped she would.
She didn’t.
Instead, she drank. Long. Deep. Her throat moved like a creature starved of water and dignity. When she lowered the bottle, her lipstick had left a jagged red crescent on the rim. A warning, not a decoration.
And—The shift.
The moment rage turned inward, folding in on itself like a collapsing star.
It bloomed in her before she even breathed—sharp and silent, curling through her like smoke in the lungs.
The thought was already there. Final. Fixed.
It tasted like copper and goodbye.
That was the curse of my gift—it let me witness the ending before the world even realised the story had begun.
It gave shape to grief while it still wore the mask of anger.
Even now, after everything, I remember that frequency of despair—the exact pitch of it—like a song I can’t unhear.
I would spend years chasing it in others, trying to name it. Trying to forgive it. The locomotive—small, cold, and silent—found its way back to my palm, a secret kept too long before finally returning home. Its destination was clear.
Sirens, hushed voices—the silence that screamed in the space where her chaos used to dance.
My backpack sat by the door, already packed. Three stolen granola bars. One water bottle. Every crumpled rand I’d scraped together from forgotten lunch money and loose change.
I hesitated. Not out of fear.
Out of something worse.
Longing.
For her laugh before it turned brittle, for the version of her who might have stayed.
I didn’t hold on to her words—they were gone, already drowned.
But the rhythm stayed.
A heartbeat wedged behind my ribs. Still echoing. Still refusing to fade.
I stood.
The front door slammed behind me like punctuation.
And I didn’t look back.
