After the Massacre

After the death of everyone, I couldn't move.

I hid in my house until the bad men left and I didn't leave until daytime. When I eventually crawled out the beaten front door I saw flies. Flies and corpses and dried blood stained on the dirt. I couldn't recognise the faces but I remembered what everyone was wearing the previous day, and the corpses clothes were clear as day to distinguish. I felt my chest tighten as I forced myself to look at our front garden. My parents lay still, my mother unharmed except for the gunshot in her stomach, my father was a different story, he had bullet holes and stab wounds littered throughout his main body but his face held little more than a bruise.

I wanted to cry, but I had been crying all night, so I screamed. I screamed in sadness, lonliness, anguish yet after 3 hours my voice gave out and I could do little more than sit on our door step and slowly fade away. I sat there for days, didn't eat or sleep and I only drank the rain that peltered me. One day I got cold, I slowly scanned the empty hell I was in for a coat, and I found my dads trusty hunting coat laying right next to me. I don't know when it got there or how but it didn't strike me as strange, if anything it did nothing emotionally for me other than allow me to return to a daze without the distraction of cold.

Later on that day a man came by, he was from a neighbouring town, a trader that would give the town supplies that we didn't have in exchange of rare foods and ingrediants that only we could grow. He wasn't a nice trader, he was always grumpy and he hated all the children in our village. However when he saw the town he stood in a shocked silence, he immediately tied up his horse and carriage before running to every corpses side to see if anyone was still alive, but no one was, then he got to my house. The trader looked at my parents, then me, he noticed I was alive and ran to my side.

I don't know how long he spent trying to get information out of me but I didn't respond. I couldn't. He eventually gave up, but when he did he put all of his might into glaring at me and making sure that I knew he hated me for not talking. After silently crying for a while the man stood up and started searching the corpses, he did the same to every house and even raided the church. The man also took some crops from our farms and he loaded up his carriage with my towns things. Yet he didn't touch my parents or our house, I don't know why, maybe I scared him. But he left after that.

I didn't care that he left me, nor did I care that he didn't leave me any food or drink. I wouldn't have consumed it anyway. Although, I did feel hurt that he stole from my town. All the men were dead and their corpses scattered throughout the town, the women and other children were no-where to be found and yet, he stole from us. But I didn't have the strength to stop him, at this point I was just struggling to stay alive.