I knew it was too good to last. It was days after my seventh birthday, when the piece of paper came through the mail, stating that daddy would not return. "It wasn't his fault he couldn't win them all." the mailman dimly remarked, trying without success to set us at ease as he passed the letter over with a trembling hand, and quickly left. "Better him than me." I heard the man mutter to himself sadly, as he slowly and clumsily drove away, clearly afraid to stay any longer.
Mom didn't start to cry like I thought she would. Her eyes were dry and her voice calm, as she placed an arm on my shoulder, as tears started to blur my vision and I closed my eyes not wanting to agitate my clearly distressed mom any further.
"Don't cry dear" she pleaded as the build up of fluid in my eyes began to force them open, "Please. Calm down. Your daddy wouldn't want to see you like this if he was here with us now. Please, for his sake, be strong."
Her kind, encouraging words had their intended effect and I managed after dabbing my eyes a few times with a nearby towel I found, taking breath after breath as I battled to bring my emotions under control, to calm down.
"But why did he have to do what he did when it was so dangerous." I asked, half mad with anger.
Out of the corner of my sight, my mother gave her own eyes a quick wipe with a sleeve, trying her best to conceal her own reaction to this terrible news in front of me. Then she looked me in the eyes and explained in a clear, unbroken voice that daddy was a hero who only did what he did because he wanted me and her to be safe.
That even if what he did for a living, seemed barbaric and cruel to some people, not to hate him for it, "You'll understand better when you get older dear." explained my mother, when I asked for what she meant. "What did he do?" I couldn't help but ask, since I genuinely didn't know back then what line of work could result in such risk and danger.
If there was one thing I liked about my mother, it was that she wasn't a good liar. She was a blunt, to the point speaker who did her best to speak in facts and not opinions or riddles. "It might be best if you don't know." she replied, clearly desperately trying to get me to abandon the subject which would come back to bite me harder than I could ever have imagined.
"Tell me!" I begged, desperate to know what a good man had sold his precious life to "I have to know!". My poor mother relented at that, and she told me everything, knowing full well that my young and inexperienced mind would probably not understand half of the things she said.
"Steely Dust was a good, selfless man who never had a chance to go to school." explained my mother, fists clenched, lips trembling. "Not many children in his parts did sadly". "Just like those factories in that story you read to me, where the rich snobby kids got to bully the poor working ones", I thought out loud.
She nodded slowly "There's more to it than that dear, but yes. Sort of like that."
I apologized for the distraction and asked her to continue. "He knew that nothing was right in the place he grew up, and desperately wanted to do something to change that. But... he just couldn't. And so one day, he ran away since he knew there was nothing for him there."
"Is that when you and daddy met?"
She blushed slightly. "About then, yes." she stated.
She went on to explain how she remembered that happy day like it was still just yesterday. A man in a mask pointed a gun at her and ordered her to come with him or else. She knew that whether she agreed or refused, the eventual outcome would be just as bad. She had said no, knowing that whatever life he would give her couldn't be worse than a quick, painless death. Or as painless as a barbarian like him could make it, since it was rare that they ever went straight for the head when they shot.
"No..." the man chuckled softly "Well then too bad... I gave you a choice." And it was then that daddy had come up behind him, and struck him in the head with a stone.
You can probably guess how the rest went.
"I did what any decent person would have managed to do. No need to thank me." daddy had said.
He agreed after some prompting, to come with my mom, since she had just about enough in her pocket to pay for a train for both of them to get away. "It's the least I could do for someone as nice as you." mom told him, as they walked hand in hand towards a nearby station.
"You don't have to give me anything for something anyone should have done anyway, but thanks. I do appreciate it." my father replied humbly, as they sat side by side in the crowded carriage they had managed to squeeze into, and he took her in his arms as she fell asleep to rest up for the long journey ahead. He kept his eyes open the whole night though to keep watch.
"The train took us to a station near here, where I thought it would be far enough from the place we came from to be safe. We came here next."
My mother did her best to find work around the village, but there was none available. The financial crisis had spread to even this part of the country, and a lot of companies had been forced to downsize, or even to shut down completely. So in the end, the only way she could make any money at all for the household was by standing in a rundown cafe some distance away from our house, washing the dishes that came through and hauling out the large stacks of rubbish. And sometimes if she was lucky, she could earn a few extra pennies by shoveling snow outside in winter, for the few neighbors wealthy enough to afford a car.
Daddy got his job one day when some very shady looking men in suits came around the village. They offered a tempting bag of money to whoever would come with them to fight for their country, they said.
And even though he was asked to not go so that he could be with his daughter (who to call a fetus by then would be generous). He shook his head, and claimed that this was the only way that we could make a sustainable source of income for the family since nowhere else wanted him as a worker and he hated seeing the mug on the mantle get emptier every day, especially when he realized what the bulge in my mom's stomach would soon mean.
He tried to make a few coins as the one who delivered paper around the block like a teenager trying to make some pocket money, but the pay was so small that he may as well have begged on the street in one of those big wealthy cities for all the good it did poor daddy.
My daddy wanted, he said, to be useful and to protect those dear to him and this job gave him the chance to do just that. And with a last goodbye to his crying wife who he had spent little under a year with, he and he alone stepped up from the crowd. "I accept this offer" he declared loudly, and with that Steely Dust became Private Dust. A brave and selfless protector, while at the same time a remorseless and relentless bounty hunter and serial killer.
"So he killed?" I gasped. "That's terrible. How could he?". "Yes I know it's terrible." soothed my mom, trying to be as understanding as she could "But he only did what he did because it was the right thing to do. He did it so that we could have a safe, and happy future free from worry. He wanted to protect you, Lightning. He wanted you not to lose your spark when those evil crazy lunatics got here too and took you away to do terrible things to you."
"But did he really have to kill all those people?" I demanded. The one thing my seven year old mind could fathom then was that killing was a bad thing that you should avoid at any cost and that talking through a problem was far preferred.
"Its difficult to explain dear. I know you probably won't understand now, but please don't hold anything against Daddy. He always loved you no matter what he did. And when you get a bit older, Lightning, you'll realize that even if violence seems bad most of the time, it is excusable under certain conditions and still better than any other alternative available."
It was then that my world turned completely upside down, and I spent the next few nights mulling over what my mom meant when she said that violence was not always wrong. It went directly against the moral of some of the nighttime stories I knew and loved about friendship and tolerance being the only acceptable solution to any problem.
It was a memorable tale, though would never come anywhere close to my favorite story, whose words brought a smile to my frowning face even after the news that daddy would never come home again had taken its toll on me.
"The man in the purple suit." it was titled, and it was a true,timeless classic at least to me. But that was a story for another time.
And the next time I read it, it would be me who read it to myself. And that upset me, since it was hearing my mom's angelic, song like voice and being gently caressed by her ,which made story time all the more special, cliched and immature as it sounded.
Not much could be said about Hope Sandreams that hadn't already been said. As the young woman's beautiful, poetic name suggested, she was a optimistic, cheerful woman who tried to make the best of every bad situation and tried to encourage others to lift their spirits too.
The second daughter of Mr Sandreams who had been told by her late father to flee after her elder sister had been seen led away by the masked men with the large, luxurious mansion in her previous hometown, after he started fearing for her safety.
She was in her mid twenties, by the time I left her, but looked even younger than that.
A professor in a university in fact, would have had trouble determining whether to admit her into a lecture room, or to tell her that a young thing like her should still be in secondary school doing her GCSE's and A levels before she pulled out her ID card to show him her actual age.
It was her tired eyes, and the deep lines on her face that gave her age away.
My mother was a strong woman, who refused to let her soft smile slip except during very special occasions. "Put bounds on your emotions or they'll put bounds on you." she would often warn me when she saw me about to throw a tantrum."And when emotions get the better of people, they do stupid things they never intended and go out of control".
How I wish I'd listened more to her now, as a loud ringing brings me to my feet.
She had lost her sister, her parents, even her friends she knew when she left home that day. Yet if it really left her with the deep depression she confessed it had, she certainly didn't show it in our day to day life together.
There was no school in the rundown village we lived in, the little I picked up in reading and writing was passed onto me by my mother. She told me that reading and writing were two very important skills that made the difference between whether a person grew to be wealthy or poor.
She couldn't teach me very much, only the basics, but by the time I left my old home I could sign my name and recognize most simple words as long as they weren't fancy words like "Xenophobia" and "Hieroglyphs". My spelling wasn't top of the class, but it was barely passable I suppose and still better than nothing.
She would have liked to teach Daddy too, but he was away from home too often to learn much and wanted to spend his time with me.
For a while after Daddy was gone, I still had company, I wasn't alone. I prayed for things not to get any worse, and for the rest of my childhood to roll by without further incident.
But any sane person who wasn't a whiny, spoiled brat knew that I want, didn't get.