Locked "Out" of the House
You are an eight-year-old girl, who love your
family. You have a five-year-old younger brother, who looks naïve and cherubim
like a typical five-year-old child. You and your brother, living next to
grandma’s house, visit Grandma almost once a week. Grandma’s house, which is an
apartment just like your house, is small but decorative.
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The house has two verandas;
one directed outward to the road is full of trees and flowers, all groomed by
Grandma, and the other, smaller one, facing the playground has an antique and
cozy armchair. Sitting on the armchair, you see and hear the children running around and giggling brightly
from the playground. What a peaceful afternoon; you sit here enjoying warm, suave breeze until Grandma calls you for dinner. Your eye leads slowly
come down. Then, you glance at an object behind the window. It is your
brother, with his blank, naïve countenance. 'Why is he standing there alone?’
He lifts up the lever, turns away and waddles out of the room. You push the window
aside but it does not move; yes,
you are locked in the veranda by your five-year-old brother.
You hesitatingly perch yourself on the chair, with the blank face and empty
brain. 'What just happened?' Yet, it takes only a few seconds for you to realize that you
cannot escape from this tiny veranda before someone appears to save you. “Grandma!
Grandma, where are you?” You call for grandma’s help, first murmuring then
raising your tremoring voice. Yet, your feeble voice can never penetrate the tightly
closed window. Furthermore, your grandma's bad ears would have no way to catch your voice. Now you are desperate:
you might even starve to death in this veranda. You keep imagining: ‘People will
find me mummified and laugh at how stupidly I died.’ Now presumably the last day in this world does not seem so peaceful and warm; you see the playful children out there, yet you are not able to join them any more. You even imagine to jump off the eleventh floor and land on the floor gently, like a cat or superhero. But, of course, you're neither a cat nor a hero.
After an hour, which felt like a
day, you see your grandma holding your brother’s hand come into the room. You quickly
approach the window and knock furiously. She opens the window, astonished. You
no longer have to worry about being a mummy. Your brother, watching you exhausted,
has cunningly innocent look as if he's saying, “I have no idea what just happened to
you”. You shout, “Grandma, he locked the window an hour ago!”
She, still holding his hand
and grinning, transmits your words to him softly “Sweetie, did you lock
the window?” “Well, I didn’t know I was locking it,” he simply replies. How can you
argue more? Your grandma thinks he capable of nothing but eating and throwing temper
tantrums. You can only forgive your young brother, but still having doubt if he
really did not know what he was doing. Why was he behind the window, doing
something, that he has no idea what it is? Nobody knows.
You learn two lessons from
this “near to death” experience: First, your younger brother can be dangerous in some unexpected way;
second, you should always be cautious when you are in a closed place. Ironically,
you escaped from the veranda but not from more traumatic experiences of locking in later on: You were to locked in a bathroom of a ferry, and then in a secluded classroom of your middleschool.
