Flash Fiction: Butchered

I just wrote this a couple months ago and thought I could share it. Seeing as I'm going to be a fiction writer, it makes since to put some of my fiction on my blog. Constructive critism is good! It's just a short little standalone.

Butchered

by Hayley Callaway

Dear dad,

Grandma didn’t want me to write this but she doesn’t need to know about every letter I send. I told her I’m a part of this pen pal exchange with a girl from New York so I could get a stamp from her. She’s afraid I’d do exactly what I’m doing now.

I’ve given up on trying figuring out how you could mutilate girls not much older than me and then come home and watch movies, help me with my homework and pet my hair when I was going through my fits of insomnia. Sometimes I think that the sleeplessness I go through is because of Claudia Dougherty or Brittany Louis or Tara Neiman. They didn’t think I should have the comfort of a good night’s sleep when their murderer was in the other bedroom. I don’t know if they were torturing me or protecting me or if they were doing it at all. What I do know is that I’ve been able to sleep ever since you got arrested.

You’d think I’d have lost sleep over the agony of knowing half my DNA comes from the Bellfield Butcher. But now that you are in prison and either justice has been served or safety has come, they let me sleep.

Grandma and Grandpa changed my last name to theirs before enrolling me in the high school here. They figured I’d been traumatized enough. I’m now Etta Fluberg, which doesn’t sound a whole lot better than Etta Pope but it’ll fit.

Dad, I’m not going to ask you the obvious question about if you would have ever done those things to me because I don’t want to know. And frankly, I don’t think you know.

Thanks for being a good dad even if you were never a good person. Consider this my goodbye and please don’t ask for me or my forgiveness especially not in fifteen years when it’s just before your execution. It’s not me that has to forgive you.

Sincerely,

Etta.