“Landscape” by johnsamuel is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
When everything went wrong
It all started two years ago. We were living happily on the farm. Just mum, dad, Jake and me. Jake and I look very different. I Looked a lot more like my mum than my dad. I had the same sandy blond hair and piercing green eyes. Yet my brother was practically a spitting image of my dad. They both have chocolate brown hair and hazel eyes. It was happy times back then, we got along so well. I wish it could have stayed like that. Two years ago our parents split up. It came as a shock. Jake and I had started to suspect that it might happen when our parents started fighting. They were fighting because dad didn’t want to live on the farm, he said that it was time to ‘spread his wings, go to the city and have some fun’. He left a few weeks after that fight. At first mum didn’t seem too upset until one night we found her sitting on her bed crying. Jake and I had no choice but to work harder on the farm so mum could have some time to herself. It was the next week we found out that we were about to have a step mum. You would not believe how angry and upset mum was. She kept saying, ‘I thought he said it was only temporary.’ Over and over as she walked about doing her normal chores. I’m Ema and now it is two years later and I just turned fourteen and Jake, twelve.
Dad came to visit about 5 months later, with his fiancée Bella. The first thing I noticed about her was that she was pregnant. I ran back inside without saying anything. How could dad do something like that? I had to face it, I was going to have a stepsister or brother, whether I liked it or not. I looked out my window and saw mum yelling at dad. I was glad she was so I didn’t have to myself. When I finally did go down to see dad, I was reluctant to speak to him and cautious of Bella. She seemed nice enough but that didn’t change anything, she could be the nicest person in the world and I would still hate her, dad was trying to replace mum with her and that would never happen with me. When they left it was like a huge weight had been lifted up off my shoulders. Mum instantly ran to her room, we could already see the mascara running down her face as she tore through the door and into the house. “Do you think she’s okay?” exclaimed Jake worriedly. “I don’t know.” replied. “I hope so.”
One year later, 2 weeks or so after my thirteenth birthday, dad phoned to say Bella had had the baby. It was a girl and her name was Lisa. Mum broke down completely. She wasn’t okay for days on end but Jake and I had to be strong and hold our family, or what was left of it, together. When I told Jake the news he went quiet and tears filled his eyes. So yeah, so much for that plan, I guessed then that I would be doing a lot more from then on.
All our troubles started when the rain went away. The crops needed the rain to help them grow properly. With the rain gone, it meant that Jake and I had more chores. On top of feeding the sheep and cattle every morning, we now had to water the crops. Now that we were watering the crops as well, we couldn’t keep as careful a watch on the sheep as we used to be able to. We also had the added weight of our new step sister to add to the pain of our dad leaving, and mum only just having recovered from the shock, making everything harder as we missed him so much.
The next day mum tripped and fell. She was carrying the pig feed to the barn and she tripped on the tall oak tree’s roots. She couldn’t get up so I called Jake and we carried her to the house. She was in so much pain that we decided that it was best we called the ambulance so she could at least get a check-up. It turned out she had broken her leg, and would need at least 3 months to heal.
“You and Jake will look after the farm won’t you?” asked mum as soon as we got home. I assured her that we would and left her to rest.
We were 3 weeks into the dry season, after the rain had finished, when Jake and I started to notice things happening. Things like the sheep being scared and when we go to investigate we can’t find anything. We thought nothing of it at the time but now I realise that was a mistake.
The first sheep disappeared one week later. We thought that maybe it had died and another had just dragged it away. I guess it didn’t help that it was a baby because we thought that it had just died from lack of food. We started to think more of it when two of our largest sheep disappeared. We notified mum instantly and even though she was still many weeks away from being fully healed, she hobbled over with her crutches to help us search for the sheep. When we were searching, we found a bloody trail that suddenly ended with a hole disappearing into the ground. We knew instantly, that this meant foxes.
Leave a Reply