Blood on My Hands
My name is Davis Morrison, and I was born in blood.
Not my own. Theirs.
When people ask about their earliest memory, they usually say something harmless. A birthday cake. A favorite toy. A trip to the park. Something soft and safe, wrapped in nostalgia.
I don’t have that. My first clear memory is blood, thick and red, staining the dirt and my shoes, drying in the lines of my small hands. I was four, maybe five. Too young to understand what I was looking at, old enough to never forget.
We were supposed to be playing, me and the only two boys who mattered in my little world. They were my best friends. Brothers, in every way except blood. That day, we slipped away from the watchful eyes of parents. I can’t remember why. Maybe we were chasing a ball, maybe we were chasing nothing at all. Children don’t need reasons to wander.
What I do remember is how it ended.
The sound of screams cut too short. The smell of iron in the air. Their small bodies on the ground, motionless, their faces pale, their clothes soaked through. My stomach turned but no tears came. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even call for help. I just stood there, staring, frozen, until the world came rushing in around me.
Adults appeared shouts, sobs, hands pulling me back. Mothers collapsing on the earth. Fathers with clenched jaws and eyes like sharpened knives.
And then the words that would carve themselves into me forever:
“If not for him, they’d still be alive.”
It wasn’t whispered. It wasn’t softened for my small ears. It was thrown at me like a stone, and I’ve been carrying it ever since.
I was the child who lived. And for that, I was guilty.
You might think children are too young to understand guilt. You’d be wrong. I understood it that day, not in language but in weight. I felt it press into my chest, heavy and permanent. Something inside me closed off. The part of me that should have run to my mother’s arms, that should have sobbed until I fell asleep it died there beside them.
From that day forward, silence became my companion.
At school, I didn’t speak unless forced. At home, I drifted like a shadow through rooms. The adults thought I was shy. They were wrong. I was numb. A ghost in the shape of a boy.
The worst part wasn’t the nightmares, though they came often enough—dreams of red stains on the floor, of voices screaming in blame. The worst part was how quickly everyone else moved on. Families buried their children. My parents whispered about moving towns. Neighbour’s avoided my eyes. The world healed around me, but I stayed broken.
You see, grief is a wound that eventually scabs over. But guilt it festers.
I didn’t cry at the funerals. I didn’t cry when their mothers glared at me with red-rimmed eyes. I didn’t cry when my father tried to explain that “sometimes things happen, and it isn’t anyone’s fault.” I didn’t believe him. I still don’t.
Instead, I learned to be quiet. I learned to watch instead of speak, to mimic other children’s smiles, to laugh when they laughed, though it never reached me. I became a boy shaped by absence, hollowed out, and I wore that hollow like armor.
I was Davis Morrison, the boy who survived what he shouldn’t have. The boy who killed without lifting a hand. The boy born in blood.
And even at five years old, I already knew: I would never escape it.
