Too Small to Reach, Too Young To Fall

Too Small to Reach, Too Young To Fall

Emily Crawford, 1st Place Winner (high school), Beyond the System Writing Contest

December 7th, 2013. It was raining. The kind of rain that soaks through the roof and creeps into the floorboards. I was six years old, My older brother was seven, and our baby brother M, just three, was still small enough to sleep with his thumb in his mouth. But that night, he didn’t wake up. The house was a complete mess like always. My parents were both drunk, passed out on the couch. Mommy had just gotten back from rehab a few days before. We had been hopeful, in the way only kids can be hopeful, that maybe this time she’d stay clean, maybe this time we’d get a real mom. But hope doesn’t last long in a house like that. By the time the sun went down, she was slurring her words and laughing too loud with my dad—until they weren’t laughing anymore.

There were more beer cans, dime bags and empty pill bottles than there was food in the house. My older brother and I tried to make some food with whatever we had that night. My dad had just gotten paid- more “adult needs” then actually necessities. We sat together in the living room playing with the scattered toys on the ground, the three of us laughing with no care or worry in the world-thinking this life was normal. I still remember the way the rain would sometimes leak through the ceiling and drip onto the ground, puddling on the floor. The wind outside howled like it was mourning something.

I saw what happened next. My older brother saw what happened next. But the two people that could have stopped it from happening didn't see it. They were right there not even 10 feet in our small 2 bedroom apartment. I should've spoken up and I should've called out. M was so small and so little. Too young to think before he acted. He must have been trying to reach the remote on top of the dresser—the one with the old TV balanced on it. He liked cartoons, even when there was no sound.

The next memories I hold personally to myself and to myself alone because no words and no feelings could ever describe what that did to me. The crash was a koud, sickening thud. Then nothing. Just silence. When we ran over, it was already too late. The TV lay shattered, the screen cracked like ice. The dresser had fallen forward, trapping his tiny body underneath. I screamed until my voice gave out. My brother tried to lift it but he was just a kid, same as me. We pulled and cried and begged M to wake up, but he never did. My parents didn’t stir. Too drunk to hear us, too lost to notice that their baby had just died.

We waited for someone to come, but no one did—not for hours. The neighbors must’ve heard the noise, but they were used to noise coming from our house. We were the family you avoided. The broken one. The one the system forgot. That night, something inside me died too. A kind of innocence, a belief that things would ever get better. The hunger didn’t just live in our stomachs—it lived in our hearts.

Starved for love, for warmth, for safety. And when M died, it was like whatever light we had left got crushed under the weight of everything we couldn’t carry anymore. I still hear the sound of that TV falling. I still see his little legs. And I still wonder what might’ve happened if someone had been sober, if someone had just been paying attention. But no one was. No one ever was. And now, he’s just a memory. A baby face frozen in time. While the rain keeps falling.