image: Life Cinematic“I was fifteen years old and it was one of those nights.”
I was fifteen years old and it was one of those nights. I awoke to the sound of my father—normally a gentle soul—shouting, yelling obscenities to nobody in particular. A high-ranking executive at a fast-growing company, my father had come home stumbling drunk after midnight with a weird and scary glimmer in his eyes that anybody who’s known a bad drunk immediately recognizes as a danger sign. I ran down the stairs to find that he had shoved my mother to the floor and flipped the dining table over. The dinner my mother had prepared for him splattered all over the kitchen and dining room walls. I hated him so much that moment. I told him that I was going to kill him. “Try it if you can,” he said. So I reached for the butcher’s knife and pointed it at him, my hand shaking like crazy, but wanting to end it once and for all. I heard my mother yell at me, “Do you want to go to jail for the rest of your life for this bastard?!” I dropped the knife and began dialing 110[1]. The police answered immediately, but I couldn’t get a single word out through my hysterical sobs, my father’s yelling and my mother’s wailing. I hung up the phone and with a strength I didn’t know I had, I propelled myself across the small living room and slammed my father into the wall. He collapsed to the floor and finally everything was quiet.
I threw on my flip flops and ran across the street to an empty lot, sobbing uncontrollably and wishing that I had a brother or sister, wishing that I were someone else, living with a different family.
That lot is gone now.
referenced works
- The emergency phone number for the police. 119 is reserved for medical and fire emergencies. ↩
location information
- Name: a now non-existent parking lot near Yoga Station.
- Address: 1-8-14 Tamagawa-dai Setagaya-ku, Tokyo
- Time of story: late night
- Latitude: 35.610889
- Longitude: 139.627969
- Map: Google Maps
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