It was my idea... unfortunately

Not that growing up in a family of eight children meant you were ever lonely; it was more that you were ‘never’ alone. Right now I was feeling I wanted to be alone, alone and a long, long way away from the current problem. Distance from the problem would definitely help, particularly once my father found out what had happened, and, whose fault it was that his second youngest son was currently bleeding out while in the arms of the eldest son. But remember (blog entry - April the 4^th, 2012), ‘I’ had insisted on throwing the stilt as it was ‘my idea’. I owned the idea and no-one could have it. I thought of it, I worked it out, then it was just my idea, years later it would be “I had the intellectual property right”. I may later have regretted the selfishness of my decision, but it was my actions that were responsible for the incident and I could not deny that…. As much as I may have wanted to, because by now, everyone else was making sure I couldn’t deny it. Distancing themselves as quickly as possible.

I managed to reach the high rear wooden gate of our house and looked up through the wire mesh fence towards the top of the red-sided cement steps at the back. I was crying heavily, emotionally drained of the adrenalin dump that had begun with the decent of the stilt and its unfortunate collision with the head of my brother. Looking up, I thought I could make out a shape that I hoped and, at the same time dreaded, was my mother. On this point I don’t remember if it was, I seem to recall that my mother was working at the time of this incident and it may well have been one of my older sisters who came out to the porch to see what had happened. Yet I recall my mother later saying I was screaming like a banshee’. Though that may also have been second hand. My mother often had the ability to witness something based upon other sourced received reports. That was a real ‘psychic’ ability she seemed to have. You would almost think she had been there.

But as I said, I couldn’t see who it was. I couldn’t even reach up and open the gate to get into the yard. My brother hung motionless and bleeding in my arms and I stood on the back path that ran out of our yard, unable to reach up through the gap in the gate to reach the latch. The others meanwhile had raced up to the fence to point the finger and call out the news of the disaster to whoever it was standing on the back steps.

‘Open the gate!’ I screamed.

(continued tomorrow)