Ten Years of Silence: The Daughter They Punished to Death

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Her mother glanced over, but she didn't walk to the window.

"She must have slipped out at some point."

"Nobody is to go looking for her."

"She doesn't have a single friend, and she doesn't have any money on her. When she gets hungry, she'll come back on her own."

Her father didn't object.

Her younger brother only asked one thing: "So who's doing the dishes tonight?"

Her older sister looked toward my cramped little bedroom.

"She's about to move into the dorms anyway. Let me use this room for my clothes from now on."

Her mother nodded.

"Fine by me. Saves her coming back and piling junk everywhere."

They didn't even wait for me to come home before they started clearing out my room.

My brother packed my old books into a cardboard box.

My sister took one look at my shabby clothes, didn't even bother to sort through them, and dumped them straight into a garbage bag.

From the very back of the desk, my father dug out a tin box.

Inside were all the notes I'd written to them over ten years.

*Punishment, day three: Mom, I really know I was wrong. Can you give me a hug?*

*Punishment, day one hundred and eighty: Dad, I came in first today. Can you just look at it once?*

*Punishment, year four: Mom, my fever's up to a hundred and two. I'm a little scared.*

*Punishment, year ten: I got into the university. Can we be a family again?*

My sister flipped through a few of them and laughed out loud.

"How does she milk it this hard?"

For a second my mother's face went stiff.

But she recovered fast, snatched the tin box away, and tipped every note inside into the trash can.

"Stop reading those."

"She wrote all that just to guilt us into going soft."

I lunged for them, desperate to gather the pages back up.

But my hand passed through them, again and again.

I couldn't hold on to anything.

All I could do was watch my brother toss an empty drink bottle in on top, pressing down every apology that had never once been answered.

I used to think that if I just died, they would be sorry.

That they'd cradle my things and cry, that they'd remember how I once trailed after them, begging them to look at me just once.

But my death didn't even interrupt them picking out a computer and a necklace.

They were still talking about how selfish I was, how scheming, how I never knew my place.

They'd already started dividing up the room I left behind.

So it turned out death didn't end my pain.

It only made me see it clearly.

There really was no one in this world who loved me.

And in that moment, a sharp, urgent knock came at the door.

"Excuse me, is it your child who fell?"