Family Tragedy

This is an adaptation of a piece I wrote for a Spanish class as a sophomore at Berkeley. It started out as a direct translation, but the piece quickly started to morph DRASTICALLY as I translated, reflecting my process of maturation of how I perceive myself today compared to when I originally wrote it. Back then, I both underestimated, or rather, was oblivious to how deeply this moment in my life impacted me forever. For my thoughts and feelings on it now, see this post. This is for my Creative Writing course at Los Angeles City College.
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At approximately 8:30 pm, I shut down the computer. I got out of my chair and headed towards my parents’ room. Walking by the wide open front door, I made a quick stop in the living room to chat with my older brother Andy and my cousin Wilbert. I was, strangely, in a decidedly good mood. In fact, that I had so suddenly changed my mind and eagerly decided to accompany my parents to the Laundromat was also odd since just an hour before I had said I wouldn’t.

I then sauntered over to my parents’ room. Upon entering, I cheerfully exclaimed, “I’m going with you guys!” They were indeed surprised, especially since the days where I’d go anywhere and everywhere with my parents had by that point been starting to fade into the infrequent.

BOOM! A strange noise, coming from the direction of the living room, startled us. “What was that?” we all wondered aloud. “One of the whoopee-cushions Victor brought must’ve exploded,” I offered as an explanation to reassure my parents and myself. Curious to pinpoint the source, I immediately left the room to see what was happening.

Walking along the dark hallway, I crept up slowly to the door frame that faced the living room. All of a sudden my vision turned blurry and my heart started racing—I panicked: I saw a man, of medium stature, carrying a red gas can in one hand and a gun in the other, shooting at my cousin Wilbert. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” my brother, tall and grown-up looking despite being only a 14-year-old boy, hauntingly yelled out in response.

Without delay, I ran into my aunt’s bedroom, a mere two feet from where I was standing, where my two uncles, aunt, uncle’s girlfriend, two young cousins and my 5-year-old sister were enjoying a novela. Frightened, I promptly shut the door behind me and shouted, “There’s a man with a gun in the house!”

“What!?” they cried, stunned and visibly alarmed. BAM! The man stormed into the bedroom as I futilely struggled to hold the door back. Breaking into the bedroom, the door slammed me against the wall, trapping me between the door, the wall and his body. Once inside, he wasted no time in shooting my uncle Jaime, killing him instantly as I watched from behind.

In a moment of foolish courage, I impetuously jostled through the door and his body, managing to escape the bedroom. His body, detached from the murderous rage, didn’t even notice.

Passing by the blood-drenched sofas in the living room, I rushed towards the front door where out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother also running. Once outside, I found my cousin Wilbert with his shirt and throat—where he had been shot—bloodied.

“I’m going to look for help, okay?” I told him, almost swallowing my words, as he nodded speechlessly and visibly in pain.

“To the left, or to the right. To the left, or to the right?” I distraughtly vacillated as I stood on the sidewalk. Something inside me told me, “No, go left, don’t go to the right,” a fleeting moment of clarity and accidental prudence that, as I later learned, saved me from witnessing or being victim to another cold-blooded murder.

I hurried towards the first house on our left and knocked and knocked to no avail. Stricken by panic, I ran hysterically a half a block across front yards until I hit a fence. Overcome with fear, I climbed over it instead of walking over to open the gate, needlessly tearing my shirt and scraping my stomach, and dashed directly towards the door. I knocked like a madman but no one answered.

Feeling more desperate and powerless, still I persisted. Yet I refused to look behind. I ran further while skipping houses until my gut sensed safety, at long last, stopping at a yellow house at the end of the block.

I frantically knocked on the door feeling as though a specter lurked behind me. A young couple, a man and a woman, opened the door, and alarmed, asked “What happened?!” On the verge of tears, I quickly explained what had happened and they let me inside at once.

They tenderly led me into the living room and sat me down while they dialed 9-1-1. Finally in a safe place, I erupted into tears—the horror finally had time to seep through to my heart. A few minutes later, the woman passed the phone to me to talk to the operator about what I had witnessed, still trembling and whimpering as I spoke; I was only an 11-year-old boy.

After hanging up, I remained motionless on the sofa—dead—drained—not paying attention to the television, turned on to the same novela my family had been watching when the man intruded, while the couple’s kids stared at me curiously and intently yet with much concern in their eyes.

Suddenly I felt sick. I charged to the bathroom, so nauseated, that even the bathroom colors revolted me. I got on my knees in front of the toilet, hanging over it for a long time, unable to throw up. I felt so vulnerable that vomiting seemed daunting, like I had a monster inside that refused to be unleashed. Hanging over the toilet, I felt so weak that though I knew I was safe there, I didn’t feel secure. I felt like I had been plunged into a movie; like I had suddenly become a fictional character—outside of my body—disconnected from reality—that had no control over the movie’s ending. I gave up. Feeling very ashamed, I walked out of the bathroom with my head hung.

The sounds of helicopters and police sirens finally began to saturate the neighborhood. The woman kindly walked towards me, trying her best to sound as soothing as possible, telling me, “The police just told me to tell you your mother is looking for you.” It was comforting to hear that I’d be reuniting with my mother before long.

The woman accompanied me to the edge of her yard, where her husband was speaking with a police officer, who directed me towards the intersection. I opened the gate to find a frenzy of patrol cars and a large crowd gathered behind caution tape. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” I thought to myself as I walked zombie-like towards the chaos of onlookers. “This happens to other people; it wasn’t supposed to happen to me...”

As I approached the crowd, a shadowy figure began walking towards me. It was perhaps the most bittersweet moment of my life: it was Mama Hilma, my maternal grandmother, who lived 15 minutes away. We embraced each other tightly, weeping together, as she tried to comfort me, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

For the first time in what seemed an eternity, maybe a total of 20 minutes of panic, terror, and escape, I felt consoled being in the arms of someone who loved me with all her heart, my grandma. But my heart was now violated and broken, doomed to never let anyone inside and doomed to never feel the past, present, or future. I lost all sense of being.