I walked up to the dusty stairs of that forsaken apartment building where it all started. It had been about eight years since I had been in that apartment complex. I was only twenty years old and eight years did not seem long enough to be away from here I wished I had run away sooner. As I touched the railing I saw a vision in my head. I was three years old. My brother was putting me up on the rail so I could slide down.

“Are you ready Jenny?” he asked.

I nodded my head to let him know that I was ready.

“Ok. 1….2….3!!” he said as he pushed me down the railing.

As I slid the door at the bottom of the steps opened. It was our mother back from the grocery store.

I yelled out to her, “Mommy catch me!” she looked up with a scared look on her face because she was worried.

“Ok baby!” she said as she quickly dropped the groceries and caught me in her arms.

We both giggled and then my brother, George, came down the steps and hugged our mother as well. She smelled like the place she worked. She worked at a coffee shop as a waitress.

As I breathed in I smelled the rich smell of coffee, of my mom, reminding me of why I was here. I had to burn the place down. It was the only way of finally getting rid of my “problem” as my mother had called it once. I looked up to the top of the stairs before I started up them. As I looked I had another vision. I was seven years old. My father had just come back from the war. He used to be so fun-loving before the war. After he came back all he wanted to do was drink and beat my mother and hurt my brother. He never hurt me though. He always said that I was the only thing he could never hurt. He said, when he was sober, that it was my eyes that prevented him from hurting me. He said they were so tearful that my eyes were the only thing that made him hurt inside because he saw all the pain he was causing me by hurting my mom and brother.

As my dad came out of the apartment, he slammed the door open. He was drunk and I knew it. I felt my eyes begin to tear up as he began to yell.

“Get your sorry butt up here in this apartment NOW!” I ran up the steps. “I’ll get you this time! I’ll beat your sorry butt so hard that you’ll never be able to sit down again!”

He raised his hand up as if to hit me. I began to cry.

“Oh stop your whining and take it like a man.” I cried even harder. By now some of the other tenants had come out of their apartments.

“What are you doing to that sorry little girl?!” they would exclaim in terror.

“NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!” he would yell and then grab me by the collar of my dress and lift me off the ground and walk into the apartment.

He would sit there and stare at me once I stopped crying. He knew he could never hurt me but he would always try. Almost every time I came home he would try to beat me but he never could.

He always would stare at me after trying to beat me and just look into my eyes. One night as he was staring at me I thought to myself I wish he would stop drinking. I wish he would just be like he used to. I don’t know how… but I must have hypnotized him. I sat there thinking the same thing over and over again and eventually I began to see something about my father changing. I began to see him look different. After that night he stopped drinking. He began to be more fun. My brother and my mother were scared of him at first. After about a month they were used to him not beating them. My family became close again. We were whole. Rumors still went around in the apartment building that my father would secretly beat us when no one was there and that he would send me and my brother around knocking on doors to see if anyone was there before he beat us.

I continued to look up the stairs. I placed my foot on the first step. Another vision popped into my head. I was twelve. My brother and I were playing tag. We ran around both floors of the apartment. About five people had moved out because they were afraid my father was going to murder them in their sleep because of his insanity. No one else had moved in so my brother and I used the apartments as hiding spots. I was hiding in my room. The one place I knew he would never look because it was too obvious. I heard someone speaking in a hushed whisper. I didn’t know who it was so I quietly snuck out of my hiding place. I heard someone else giggling. I got on my hands and knees and crawled out of my room. It was my father and another woman. This woman wasn’t my mother so I just sat there watching them. The woman only had on a brazier and a skanky pair of underwear. The woman took a brown bottle and put it to my father’s lips. He took a swig of the liquid in the bottle. I looked closer at his eyes. I could always tell when he was drunk because his eyes would turn blood red. Sure enough his eyes were red.

I figured that the woman, whoever she was, had made my father get drunk. My father put his hand on the woman’s lower back. She leaned in and kissed him. She teased him. She would put the bottle to his lips and then pull it gently away and pour a bit down her brazier. He would lick her wherever the liquid was on her body. I decided that I should go so I quietly walked out when my father wasn’t looking. I told my brother when I found him and he went into the apartment and grabbed a blanket and some pillows and we sat in the apartment on the first floor. I fell asleep and my brother stayed up to wait for our mom to get home. It wasn’t that much later that in my sleep I heard a loud moaning from the apartment above. About an hour later our mother came home. My brother had been reading the whole time so he left a note on his book telling me that he was outside the apartment with our mom.

I found the note and went into the hallway. The place was a mess. All my stuff and my brother’s stuff and my mom’s stuff were strewn all over the floor. I went up to our apartment and opened the door. My father was sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. I guess I had been asleep for a while because I didn’t notice the stench from our apartment. It smelled of rust and salt. A disgusting combination. It reminded me of the smell of blood. I walked over to my father. He wouldn’t look at me. I snapped my fingers In front of his face and he did nothing. I went into my brother’s and my room. I looked around at our room. My eyes stopped at my brother’s bed. There sitting on top of it was my brother. His eyes were closed so I concluded that he was asleep. I ran over to his bed and jumped on it. He didn’t wake up like he normally did when I jumped on his bed. I noticed that his head was turned to the side.

I took hold of his chin and turned his face towards me. The whole opposite side of his face was covered in blood. I went into shock and stumbled onto the floor where there was a huge bloodstain on the carpet. I jumped up and ran into my parents’ room looking for my mom. My mom was in her room, but she was slumped against the wall. There were huge red stains on the wall. I ran over to her and began to cry huge sobs.

“M-mommy?” I said through tears.

She was still alive but she knew she wouldn’t make it.

“Hey baby.” she said I a raspy voice.

I cried. I knew she wouldn’t make it too. I didn’t want to give up hope though. I put my head in her lap.

“Baby I need you to be strong. I need you to get away from here before he hurts you too.” she said, near the end of her life. I began to protest.

“Who! Who hurt you mommy! Who! I’ll get them caught! I won’t let them hurt you like this. I’ll take you to the hospital and….and...”

“No baby, no. It’s too late for me. I want you to run. Run away from here. Get as far away as you can.” She said.

She looked into my ocean blue eyes and with all the strength she had, lifted her hand up on my head and petted my hair.

“I love you baby.” was the last thing she said to me.

I cried. I cried so hard that my throat had still hurt four days after. I got up and started to walk out the door. As I turned I saw my father standing in the doorway. Then it hit me. My father had killed my mother and brother. Apparently he saw in my face that I had found him out.

“You’ll rat me out eh? You’ll tell the police huh? You won’t be able to tell them if you’re dead will you?!” He said.

I looked him square in the eyes and said, “I’m not scared of you anymore daddy. I hate you! I hope you die a worse death than mommy and georgy!”

He looked right at me and lifted me up by the back of my neck. His grip was crushing. I tried to get away but couldn’t. He slammed me against a wall. I felt something warm running down the side of my face. He slammed my head against a door. I felt the warmness trickling down my nose. Now we were at the top of the stairs. He turned me to face him and then threw me down the steps. My head hit the stairs over and over. More of the warm stuff spewed all over my clothes. I looked down at my clothes once I stopped falling. They were soaked in blood. That was the warm feeling.

“I thought I could never hurt you Jenjen” he said.

He was calling me his made up pet name for me. I wondered why.

“I never wanted to hurt you.” he said.

He went into the apartment and grabbed a gun. He walked out and began to pace back and forth.

“I didn’t even want to hurt you now.” he said.

“I don’t think you’re going to make it alive Jenjen. So you won’t have to live with this moment for long.” he said.

He pointed the gun towards himself and pulled the trigger. I jumped at the sound of the gunshot and fell into a coma.

Someone who lived in the apartment building must have come home later that night and found me lying on the floor, unconscious.

She took me to the hospital and I was put In the E.R. I lay there unconscious for about a week. By that time most of my bruises had healed, and yet there were still parts of me that could never heal. I was scarred for life. I had no mother, or father. My brother and I would never play tag or hide-and-seek again. He would never be there to protect me. I was alone now. I vowed to myself that I would never go back to that apartment building, and yet here I was eight years later.

I ran to the top of the steps, kicked open the door and ran into my old room. The whole apartment was empty. I jerked open the drawer to my night table and found an old box of matches. I opened the box and grabbed five matches and struck them against the side of the box. I held them all in my fingers. I dropped the first one on the floor where my brother’s old bed used to be. I walked into where my parents’ room had been and dropped the second match where my mother’s lifeless, dead form had sat slumped over on the wall. I walked out of that room and into the kitchen. I dropped the third match where the kitchen table used to be. I walked out of the apartment. I began to smell smoke. I breathed in the wonderful smell of all the terrible memories I had of this place being burned, suffocated to a life of hell.

I dropped the fourth match on the top step. I held the last match in my hand. I walked down the steps. As I reached the last one I looked at the match in my hand. All of the sudden I heard my mother’s soothing voice in my head.

“Baby, it’s all right. Do what you have to do.”

I felt tears form in my eyes and I threw the last match down. I walked out of the apartment building. It had stood old and dilapidated earlier that day, but now, now it was going to burn and I would sit there and watch it. I walked a ways away from the building and sat on the ground. My “problems” were over now. I would never have to stare at this place while I was living in my house with my husband and child. Never again would I have to look across the street and see the terrible building looming over my sanctuary, my home, ever again.