• August 15th, 2---
    Dear Journal,
    I’ve decided to start this off with ‘Dear Journal’ instead of ‘Dear Diary’ because that’s what girls do. I’m not a girl, by the way. I am a fifteen year old boy (not for very long, I’ll be sixteen in four months). Why is a fifteen year old boy writing in a diary you ask? Because my aunt thinks it will be a good way to ‘get my feelings out’, which is her way of saying ‘learn what I think because I don’t talk to her’. I have not said a word since the War took everything I loved away from me. I will not speak.
    The large room was lavishly furnished, clearly the work of someone with an eye for detail and deep pockets. Streaks of silver poured through a bay window, where a boy sat hunched over a book. He was lanky in the most awkward of ways, with a mop of auburn hair that begged to be groomed. His azure eyes scanned the freshly inked page, then rested on the canopy bed that took up most of the left side of the room. Setting the book down on the window seat, he hobbled on crutches across the carpet and threw himself on the striped linen. The boy shut his eyes tightly, but sleep would not come. Dull booms still resounded in his mind, robbing him of his slim chance at a good night’s rest.
    The memory of that day was as clear as it gets.

    Zinnia and phlox danced in the summer breeze, while grasses nodded their heads in wistful sleep. The boy sat cross-legged amongst hyacinth and amaryllis, while a plump girl braided forget me not’s in his auburn tresses, her own strawberry blonde curls flouncing. Their mirth was apparent in their behavior, and the girl’s was especially noticeable in the way her cerulean eyes beamed, which made her smile without the upward turn of her lips. A slight figure emerged from the house behind them. The woman wiped her hands on her checkered apron.
    “Austin, I need you to go to the store,” she chimed.
    “Soon, Mom,” was his curt response.
    “Not soon, now. We’re out of milk and I’m baking a cake.”
    “Fine.” As he rose to his feet, the girl clung to the hem of his pants.
    “We haven’t finished playing. Don’t leave me, Aussie,” she pleaded.
    “Let go of your brother, Morgan,” their mother began sternly. Then, softening, she added, “Come inside and I’ll let you taste the icing when I make it.”
    “Yes’m.” Slowly, her grasp on him loosened, and she trotted inside the sliding doors. Hiding behind her mother’s gingham skirts, Morgan waved to her brother.
    “Hurry up, Austin. I want you back here in an hour,” the mother said, her resemblance to him growing more as they both frowned.
    “Yes, Mummy Dearest,” he mumbled as he sauntered out of the gate.
    Half an hour down the road, Austin was still sulking. His mother had been in a sour mood the past week, but for what reason he didn’t know. She had stopped speaking other than to give orders, and the radiant smile that was usually plastered on her face was substituted by a stormy glare. He did not want to think of his mother anymore. He just wanted to get this outing over with.
    He gazed at his feet with each step, then halted when he noticed a trail of ants scuttling across his path.
    “Dumb bugs,” Austin grumbled with disdain. As he lifted a large foot to crush them, a thunderous blast stopped him. A tremor coursed through the earth, and he turned his head toward the sound. Barely within his field of vision, where a grand house once proudly stood lay an insignificant pile of rubble, covered in flames that lashed out in every direction. From the horizon came compact airplanes, their loud droning a warning of their proximity. Bombs rained from the sky, annihilating everything on their course. Austin turned and ran like all the hosts of hell were after him, stumbling now and again in panic.
    “There’s no way the War could have spread,” he thought frantically, “Is there?”
    If he was one to look back when fleeing from something, he might have had a better chance, surprisingly. But Austin had watched too many bad movies and believed it was better to keep his eyes fixed forward. He might have seen the bomber plane coming closer to him, and adjusted his position more to the left, but this was not the case. The bomb fell just a few feet behind him, the force of the explosion flinging him yards down the road as if he were nothing more than a rag doll.
    The pain coiled its tendrils around his legs, digging thorns past muscles until they settled in his bones, where it took root and blossomed. Rushing water was all he could hear, and his eyes were caught under an intense haze. Crawling up his arm was a lowly ant, who waved her antennae in an expression of sympathy.
    “You’re teasing me, aren’t you? I’m no safer from being crushed than you are, huh?” he whispered between ragged breaths. Austin fell unconscious with an eerie smile on his face.
    Blurred hues of white were the first things he saw when he woke up weeks later. The second was his aunt speaking with a doctor at the foot of his hospital bed. He was petted by his mother’s estranged elder sister from the city as two sets of news were broken to him. The bones in both of his legs had been shattered in the explosion, leaving him unable to walk without some form of assistance for nearly a year, if not more. The second was much worse. He was the only survivor.
    As Austin sat with his hands folded, his aunt spoke with the doctor out in the hall. He could hear the laughter mingled in between snatches of conversation, which made anger well up inside of him. How dare they laugh at a time like this? Did they not understand the gravity of the situation?
    Austin endured the past grueling five months with his prissy aunt and her husband, choosing to go through the motions of life rather than truly live it. Now, he lay in his bed, thinking of the mother and sister who left him, who did not even receive as little as a memorial service or whose names were not allowed to be spoken. Not that he bothered to speak, anyway. He had not told them he loved them the very last time he saw them, because he had no idea it would have been the last. For the past few weeks, he had wondered exactly why he had stopped speaking since that day, especially when his silence drove his aunt clinically insane. Tonight, his answer came with the thoughts that haunted him. Austin did not say what was important when it needed to be said, so he just wouldn’t bother anymore. Besides, what was the use of talking when you had nothing left to say?