so, they were leaving again.

just when sionnach had come to grips with her new home. just when she had mapped every stone and tree, and finally settled. just when she was finding her stride, feeling like she was no longer underneath the oppression of uncertainty, it was all being blown open -- sionnach left in the centerfield, taken aback, awestruck, stupefied.

and she hated being stupefied, out of control, at a loss for her normal words.

she swore she wasn't going to go.

she kicked and screamed, bit and tore, howled and cursed -- she did unspeakable things, threw unimaginable tantrums, issued unseeming insults -- but her parents would not budge, they were moving, and that was that -- how could they be so inconsiderate to her?

she was being trampled underfoot, root and stem; the final straw being when @Liffey and @Rannoch had announced it was time to go.

i'm not going. sionnach protested -- to unsympathetic parents that had been worn exhausted by her hysterics. their faces were bone-tired, their stance unmovable -- it was then, desperate and seeing how unshakable her plight was, that sionnach drew back the knife that cut down her parent's throats, the blade she had been closely guarding in her heart.

"NO WONDER WISTERIA RAN AWAY FROM YOU!" the child screamed in vitriol, voice edged with a child's frustrated terror -- "YOU GUYS DON'T CARE ABOUT ME OR ANYONE BUT YOURSELVES! YOU PUSH EVERYONE AWAY!"

and so went the child's uncontrollable diatribe, followed swiftly by sionnach darting into the thickets with a choked sob, blind to the urgent calls of her parents, and never once looking back.

---