English Lab for All Souls

I awoke from my dream almost instantly from the familiar sound of a loud thud on our red hollow door. There were three powerful knocks, a moment of silence followed by the raspy, shaky voice of Hunnington’s chief police, “Mr.Lofton…?.”   I was only four at the time but I could sense by my father’s reaction to the news that the blistering cold December night brought us that something was terribly wrong.
This nightmare has been continuously haunting me for five years now… bringing back the event of my mother’s death. I knew that night by daddy’s rage that he would be completely changed. The Hunnington community played a big role in daddy’s hopeful recovery at first, but he soon became too raw for them to handle and it was as if everyone we once knew disappeared from our lives. He was living in his own world now, only consisting of him and I. He did only what was necessary to pass the next few years by.
You would think that after such time it would not affect me this much but the truth is the pain only grew stronger as I grew older and begun to realize that unlike most of the kids at school I did not have a mommy.   Tears streamed down my face as I glanced to the bed next to me where my new step-sister Lily was sleeping peacefully. She was a beautiful, young woman with friends and boys chasing her all around our small town, and I was her annoying little step-sister excelling in all things unpopular and un-cool. Peacefulness, however, was not the look her face portrayed lately. Daddy was not very fond of Lily. She did not want to be told what to do by someone who was not her father. They constantly fought day and night about anything imaginable. The tone in daddy’s voice, when he spoke to Lily, rang of anger and despair, and I knew it was related to the nightmare that keeps haunting me in my dreams.
Daddy was never the same after that visit from the chief police towards anything, except for me. I was in his words, “all he had left,” although I knew... [continues]

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