The Silence: A Short Story

By Margaret Chatwin

There’s no place like home. Except when home really sucks – then there’s just no place.
His mom’s boyfriends are never nice, but after the newest one explodes, hurting him, ten-year-old Neilson flees home.
With nowhere else to go, he finds himself on the porch of an abandoned house.
But the thing is, the house is no longer abandoned and the mysterious stranger staying there has a secret.

Follow the memories back to 1978 in this short story of a boy struggling to find his place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Margaret Chatwin
• Release date: Apr 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463886717

Margaret Chatwin

I love to laugh, which is weird, considering that my favorite types of movies are dramas. I guess I just crave the emotion they create and their ability to let me inside the head and heart of the character.I like my books the same way - soulful and raw.I don't pretend to be a professional writer. I'm not schooled in all the ins and outs of forming a perfect paragraph, etc, but I do work my tail off to build characters that you can really "feel." Characters that you can fall in love or hate with. Characters that will make you want to turn the next page.You can read reviews of my books or leave one of your own at: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5342646.Margaret_Chatwin

Book preview

THE SILENCE

A SHORT STORY

BY MARGARET CHATWIN

Copyright © 2020 by Margaret Chatwin. Smashwords Edition

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, dead or

alive, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the author. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Cover Credits:

Photo: Rob Byron/ShutterStock.com

Cover Design: Margaret Chatwin

OTHER NOVELS BY MARGARET CHATWIN

Taking the Fall

Sweet so Fragile

101

Erased

OTHER SHORT STORIES BY MARGARET CHATWIN

Abduct

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

OTHER BOOKS

SNEAK PEEK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WHERE TO FIND ME

CHAPTER ONE

1978

I was ten years old that spring, and I only remember three things about it: My mom’s new boyfriend, Bud.

The shiny black Trans Am.

And, Kaleb.

I’m pretty sure the first guy ever to hit me was my father. I have this vague memory of sitting in a highchair and an angry man rushing toward me, smacking me in the head. I assume it was my dad because my mom said he stuck around until I was two years old.

I don’t remember him. Or, I guess maybe I do.

I can’t remember who hit me next, or next after that, but I do remember the night Bud hit me. I remember it clearly because he drove that shiny black Trans Am. It had a gold phoenix painted on the hood, and when Bud gassed it and that souped-up engine roared . . . well, it gave me chills in places I never knew I had before.

That was one super cool car, so naturally, my young mind assumed Bud was going to be one super cool dude.

He wasn’t.

The first time he ever laid into me was on a Thursday night. My mom was passed out on the couch and didn’t know it was happening, so she did nothing to stop it. But even if she’d been wide awake, she’d have only said something like, stay out of his way if you don’t want to get hurt, Neilson.

But I hadn’t been in Bud’s way. I hadn’t even been in the same room with him. I’d been in the kitchen scrubbing as hard as I could with a pink eraser, trying to get my mistakes to come off of my math homework. Or, I guess they were mistakes. I didn’t understand how to do the problems, so I didn’t know if I was even getting warm with the answers.

Bud was in the living room, drinking beer and yelling into the phone that connected to the kitchen wall. The long cord stretched so tightly that there wasn’t even any curl left in it. It ran over the top of the table and the place I was sitting, and it kept brushing across the top of my ear.

When Bud finally yelled, Kiss my ass, Roland, and raged into the kitchen to slam down the receiver . . . Well, that’s when that cord had enough play to coil up like a rattlesnake around my head. The more I struggled to break free, the more tangled I became. And that’s when Bud blew his top, spewing his molten lava all over me.

When the whole thing was over, I left the house through the screened back door. The spring on top was pretty tight, making it slam closed with a bang so loud that it silenced all the chirping crickets in the fields that entirely surrounded the house.

And stay away from that barn and my car, you little shit, Bud’s words followed me out.

They were another blow to the head because the barn had always been mine. It was mine long before he came around. It was my place of refuge when I was hurt. My place to hide. My place to play and dream,