Word Count: 275
The day they found him and brought him up from his cellar room he screamed and fought them but they didn’t understand why.
He’d lived there since he was three. A boy instead of the girl that she desperately wanted. It was dark in his room, with thin light coming in through a window filtered by fences and trees. But it was warm. His room was next to the furnace so he never was cold. Once a year they brought him outside in a snowstorm. Just to show him how lucky he was. Frozen by winter’s wind, blinded by light, he was grateful the rest of the year.
It took them ten months to teach him to speak and to write his own name. It took him longer to trust other people. He missed his mother who he used to see once a day. They told him they were searching to find her but hadn’t had any luck yet. He tried to tell them they were there, his mother and father, in the cellar, living in separate rooms.
They went back one more time to the house that was boarded and due to be knocked down any day. It came as a shock to find two skeletons hidden away in the basement and felt horrible that they hadn’t found them sooner. His mother, his father, likely left to starve because no one had found them there.
But the medical examiner knew the minute he saw the bones. Two boys, one older one younger, dead many years at least. They never did find the parents, or the daughter who was lucky to have gotten away.
Oh yes – truly horror-ful