Heather crouched behind the bush, wishing that everything hadn’t just changed so drastically. Even though it was all an accident, it wasn’t a very forgiving one. Sure, her father may get over it, but Heather knew she never would.

Only minutes before, Heather had been up in her room, listening to her parents fighting going on downstairs in the kitchen. Blasting music from her radio still never seemed to cover the noise of the screaming that was coming from downstairs. Usually she tried to steer clear of their arguments, but it had been four hours, and Heather was starving. So she went downstairs and peeked around the corner of the kitchen door.

“Get out,” her father had said, pointing a rifle at her mother’s heart.

Normally, Heather would have walked away, worried for her mother, but knowing that her father would never really use the gun. Heather knew that her mother would come back, back into her father’s arms just a couple of days later, until he became drunk again and forced her to leave.

But today, a rage burned inside of her, and Heather couldn’t take it anymore. She was sick of her father and the way he treated her mother, sick of the way her mother would always come back to him. She was sick of the way her mother and father always had each other, and how neither would leave no matter how bad it got. And most of all, Heather was sick of the way her father never loved her,let her know he didn’t love her. And he never would. In his eyes, all she was was a mistake.

So she ran into the kitchen and tried to knock the gun from her father’s hands.

But he turned, and she missed. The gun went off, right into her mother’s heart.

So Heather ran, tears streaming down her face. She wanted to forget, she wanted to move on, she wanted to get away from her terrible life now turned one hundred percent worse. But when she tried to bring her mind somewhere else, all Heather could see was the look on her mother’s face before she fell to the ground, twisted in pain, then strangely calm. Heather had looked at her father, who was, for once in his life, speechless. Deep down, he had never wanted her mother killed, Heather knew that. Then she ran out of the room.

And Heather never wanted to go back, not now, not ever, to that place where so many evils occurred.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a choice. Footsteps were coming.