It had been a full school year since that day, and yet the same moistly chilled trickle of wind feathered through my hair. It was unusual that I was alone at recess; in fact it was the only time that I remember ever having the pleasure of freedom from the hustle of my life. When I wasn’t being called upon to maintain conversation, my thoughts were clearer and my senses were heightened. I could pay much more attention to the incense of the air and the sounds that surrounded me.
Lying far away from any disturbances, I found a game in isolating certain noises and labelling their sources in my mind. The soccer goalkeeper yelled at his forward, girls shared gossip about their love life and teachers kept tabs on the attendance. The basketball’s concussive bounce echoed through the playground to my right as a young pup howled at the cars and trucks passing by to my left.
Strangely, I heard one of these cars – a louder one, a muscle car- turn onto the side of the street. Its engine quickly halted and someone got out and opened the trunk. I found it unusual that anyone would be stopping at the school grounds in the middle of recess, so I directed my attention to that matter. The person’s strides were long and ended heavy clicking footsteps. I concluded it was a full-grown man wearing hard toed shoes. As the steps came closer his deep, vocalized breathing became audible, and soon after, I smelled an awful stench of alcohol.

“Hey, friend. Do you want to help me?” He slurred, dragging his toe down the outline of my leg.
I didn’t respond.
After a pause he challenged, “Are you deaf or something?”
The word, “No.” passed my lips.
“Can you help me?” he repeated. Once again I didn’t respond, but in only a second he grasped my mouth with his hand, tightly wrapped his arm around my shoulder and dragged me from the ground. I attempted to scream but his hand trapped the desperate shriek in my throat. I kicked and twisted in the frantic effort to release myself from his grasp, but in only seconds he threw me onto the rough carpet of his trunk. The slam of the door sent ringing through my ears as I cried for help with no answer. I kicked and punched the trunk door with all the strength I could gather but didn’t make the smallest dent in the door’s metal framing. The heat in the trunk grew with every attempt at escape, every scream and, after the sweat began to pour down my back, every laborious breath. After what seemed like hours of trying to escape, my hope was diminishing. I had no way of knowing where the car was taking me, how long I would be in it, what they would do with me and worst: if I would survive. The bumps in the road tossed me around; throwing me into metal and scraping my skin against the thick, rough carpet. One of these bumps brought a previously unnoticed tire iron under my detection. Our simultaneous bouncing had united us in a very abrupt – and painful – clunk on my head. Wielding my newfound weapon, I fought for freedom.
Freedom... the thought echoed through my desperate mind. How strange it seemed that only just over a year ago I was unleashing my passionate cries upon the marvellous workings of the Grand Canyon- my mother’s arms wrapped around my chest, her hair whipping in the freely flying wind.

“Do you feel it? He’s here.” She said.
“Dad?” I replied.
She wafted the air with her hand, “In the wind.” Her hand closed around my wrist with motherly tenderness and moved my hand in a flowing choreography.
“I feel him,” I said. My father’s spirit wafted through my fingers. The familiarity, the love—the enlightenment. It all was perfect. “Dad! I know you’re here! With me! With me and mom!” The echo of my cry rang off the walls of the canyon, “Hey Dad, I’m going to school this year!”
My mom’s body started shaking, and I felt her warm tears drop on the top of my head.
“You won’t believe this but Mom’s crying,” I yelled to my father.
“Hey bud, the guide bus is leaving soon,” my mother said, covering her emotions.
“I just want to say one more thing okay?” I replied.
I felt her head nod against mine. She kissed me and her arms tightened around my chest.
“I know you won’t be able to put me on the bus on my first day, but you’ll be with me the whole time,” I held up the wedding ring that was passed down to me after his passing, “Right here! On my finger…”
“Buddy, we have to go okay?” my mother said.
“I love you!”

In time, my breaths became desperate for oxygen, and had little answer from the thick, hot air in which I was trapped. The cars exhaust started to leak into the trunk until my every pant sank me closer to death. I began feeling abnormally light-headed, my movements seemed strangely smooth and a dark cloud of ideas filled my mind: Where will he kill me? What will my mother do when she finds my dead body? Will it hurt?

At last, my thoughts were answered. The man stopped the car, opened the trunk and in a final attempt of escape, I jumped out at him kicking, screaming and clubbing sporadically with the tire iron. The man was startled. I felt him fall back for a second but he regained his balance without trouble. As I started to run away, his arm jammed my torso to a halt and I felt a strong pinch on my neck. It hurt at first but after a few seconds full of desperate squirming the pain went away. Before long, my body felt numb and my squirming became helpless swaying. I felt elevation, heard a high-pitched ring and lost consciousness.

I woke up in an uncomfortable haze. I had no knowledge of where I was, if I was alone, or how long I had been unconscious. The first physical sensation I was aware of was the pain. A tight band dug into my eyes, a strip of tape was strapped over my mouth and two ropes were tied harshly around my wrists and ankles. My arms were tight behind my back. When I tried to move I realized that I was tied to a chair. The back of it dug aggressively into my arms, and the legs pressed painfully into the bones in my ankles. I could feel the wood grain on my naked bottom as the swelling from past events - which I didn’t remember - pounded heavily. The taste of hunger lingered in my mouth and there was a blockage of phlegm when I breathed. As I cleared my throat I heard the sound bounce sharply off walls, distorting its pitch and longevity, and when I inhaled, the smell of fresh paint filled my nostrils. I concluded that I was in a small, freshly painted room with no soft furniture to absorb sound. There was no jittering, or breathing other than my own which led me to believe that who ever it was that put me here had left. As if to answer this thought, the noise of a car peeling out of the driveway and accelerating down the road came in through an open window. A cool breeze followed and chilled my sweating body.

After several attempts, I found a rhythm of movement with which I could nudge the chair and gradually move it in any direction. I stuck to a path until I knocked into a table; something fell off the edge, landed on my knee and cut me. In shock of the sudden pain, I jolted the knife into the air and held back a scream. The sharp blade stuck into what sounded like a hardwood floor- the deep concussive sound bouncing around the walls of the room. I felt warm blood trickle down my leg; its rusty scent filled my nostrils.

Despite the pain, I knew that somewhere in front of me a sharp knife was sticking straight up out of a wood floor.

“Bravo Company R- Four- Six,” I said as the effects of jet lag and the white noise of passing cars took over my body-which had been highly active over the past week at the Grand Canyon.
“That was his battalion,” my mother replied, “His friends called him by his nickname.”
“He had a nickname?” I asked.
“They called him BlackEye.”
“Blackeye. That’s cool. Bravo Company R- Four- Six, Blackeye. Dad was cool,” I speculated, “What did he look like?”
“ You look a lot like him. I see him in you sometimes.”
“What happened to him, Mom?”
“I’m not ready to tell you that, Peter,” she sighed, “I’ve told you that I will when you’re older. Now I know that you’re sleepy, so take a nap. And I’ll wake you up as soon as we get home. Tomorrow’s your big day. The first day of school.”
“Yay,” I groaned, exhausted.
“Sleep tight, Bud.”

As a gentle breeze cooled my back, I felt my heart soar out of my chest in a whirl of determined anticipation. The knife was my key to escape. I jolted my chair forward with haste and thought of my mother’s joyous embrace. I thought of being unbound like the breeze that blew at the sweat on my back. Somewhere in my gritty endeavour, a sharp pain shot up my foot. I clenched my jaw tightly as I nudged myself away from the knife, pulling it out of its deep resting place in my toe. Even more blood dripped down to the floor. Fighting the throbbing pain of my fresh wound, I moved my chair to the left and started cutting the rope that tightly dug into my ankles. With each nudge I sank deeper into the rope and in several minutes, I could move my legs freely of each other and place my feet firmly on the cold flooring. I suspended myself in an arch over the knife and began to rock my wrists along the blade. I began to test how much weight the knife was able to take without getting pushed out of the wood. I became eager and impatient and before long, I snapped the knife out of the hardwood floor and into my back. I screamed out in pain, as the smell of blood grew exponentially more potent. Every muscle contracted like a rock, my body twisted into an arched bridge and I felt every fibre of my existence fiercely attempting to escape the pain of my lesion. I rolled and screamed in a growing pool of blood and distress, gradually becoming more resistant to the wrenching pain in my back. I wanted to be free so wholly that after only a minute, and without my body’s approval, the knife was in my hands severing the rough rope that constricted my wrists.

I was free; the unyielding blindfold was no longer digging into my eyes and my mouth pulsed with stinging freedom from the duct tape. I searched the table on which I found the knife and discovered a cell phone.
“9-1-1. What is your emergency?”
“I’ve been kidnapped, I’m bleeding and I’m naked in an empty room but I don’t have any idea where I am,” I replied.
“We will track the phone call and will have emergency services coming your way in forty seconds. Can you keep us on the phone for that long?”
“I can-“
Suddenly, I heard a screech of tires and a car pull up into the driveway from out the window. The engine cut out and the door opened and closed. The man with hard toed shoes took a step towards the house when a second one shouted from behind the windshield, “Hurry up we don’t have much time. The kid will wake up!”
The other replied, “Yeah, yeah. You forget things too sometimes.”
I heard the footsteps of the man out of the car coming closer to the house.


“They’re back.” I whispered.
“Okay, just keep this phone call running for twenty more seconds.” She replied.

I threw the cell phone out the window to hide it from the approaching man. The hard toed shoes came calmly up the stairs outside the room, but turned the other way. Praying to hear a siren, I listened closely out the window.

The second man opened the car door and walked a couple of steps.

“Hey Richard. You left your phone out here on the grass.” He said.
There was no answer from the man inside the house.
“Hey Richard! Its out here!” he repeated. The footsteps of the man walked closer to the house and reached the front door. He charged in.
“Hey Richard, your phone is on the line with 9-1-1! Check on the kid!” He said.
The knob on the door in front of me started to twist frantically. It was locked. I heard a key slip into the lock, and I made one final attempt at freedom. I jumped out the window, fell for a second and landed hard on the ground below. A sharp pain shot up my leg and I hit my head on the ground.

The grass smelled fresh and a bird chirped in the distance. My head started to feel woozy as the pain in my leg increased, but far off in the distance, several miles away, I heard a siren. It was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in my life. There was no bell or choir that could articulate the elegance that the siren rang throughout my head. I wanted the siren for myself – I needed it. So much so, that I lost all reason and I started to crawl towards the sound. After only seconds, the siren multiplied. There were nine, ten, eleven magnificent sirens rushing towards me. I heard the man’s voices curse and snarl from the room from which I had escaped.
To this, I wrenched myself off the grass to run away. After only a single step, a climax of torture ripped through everything I’d ever known and loved. The pain was in every way the most unpleasant experience one could ever encounter.
The wet-snap that echoed through the street pulled my existence to an unreachable hell. As my leg collapsed under me above and below the knee, I fell to the ground in a cluster of emotions, physical anguish and weakness. My surroundings were a blur. The sirens got louder. The tires of Richard’s car peeled out of the driveway and down the street once more, and the blood continued to seep out of my back. Several police cars whizzed past me in pursuit of the men, but many more squealed to stop beside me. My body became weightless as I slid into a haze of oblivion that consisted of a single, angelic siren. It was muffled and high pitched, but its beauty was still true.

It seemed like a few minutes had passed before I became aware that my body was no longer on the ground, but elevated on a stretcher.
There was a voice shouting at me, “What is your name?”
“Peter Fathenhill, sir.” I slurred back.
“Hi Peter. How do you feel?” He asked.
“Dizzy. Leg’s broken.” I replied.
“Do you know your mommy’s number?”
“Yes. Seven, One, Two. Five, Five Five. Oh Nine Six Seven.”
“Thank you. She’ll be on her way shortly. Peter how many fingers am I holding up?” he asked.
“Can’t see ‘em” I said.
“I need you to open your eyes, Peter and tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.” He explained with at a slower tempo.
“No” I said.
His next words faded into the mess of sirens, shouting, smell of gasoline and taste of hunger until one specific code passed his lips.
“Bravo to dispatch, we’ve got a code R Four-Six. We’ll be right in. Have an emergency room ready…Peter, stay with me. How many fingers?”


A sweet breeze rolled over my face through the ambulance window, and I felt my father’s love tight around my finger as I spoke the last few words before succumbing to the effects of the blood loss, concussion and agony.

“I’m blind, sir.”