Page 157 - Dash Inspirations by Linda Ellis

Scars and Memories
“Anybody moves, she gets it . . .” More than 35 years later, those words ring in my ears as though I’d heard them yesterday. They were spoken by an unknown entity standing in front of me, whose raspyd voice I didn’t recognize and whose face remains in my mind as nothing more than a masked silhouette in a poorly lit hallway. Yet that voice, that silhouette, and that day left behind a scar in my psyche that time has yet to heal.
As he firmly motioned us, using the gun in his hand, to the room in back of the building, I remember feeling his sinister presence walking behind me. I can still feel that uneasy curiosity parading through my mind as he followed us, walking slowly and deliberately into the storeroom. It was a morbid curiosity of what the bullet he would surely be sending in my direction might feel like as it penetrated my skin. To this day, that memory brings with it an eerily haunting sensation, along with the inescapable thoughts of a “what if” scenario.
After he had herded seven of us like cattle into the storeroom, I never turned my head to look back. I faced the wall, standing still, adjacent to a concrete pillar that, at the time, provided support for both the building and my body. I squeezed my hands together until my fingers turned white from lack of free-flowing blood. I began to pray. I prayed so hard, if felt as though my brain began to hurt. I squinted my eyes as if that might somehow expedite my desperate pleas on their journey upward. I focused and prayed so honestly that I made up for every minute of every Sunday I’d ever missed in church.
The gun he had held was like the delete button on a keyboard. Gone in an instant was a part of the innocence I’d possessed through my childhood and into my young adult years. For the first time, death became more of a realization than a visualization to me, and suddenly, as a very strong possibility. The thief took with him much more than money as he fled the scene that evening, because he had also stolen pieces of my spirit’s purity, hope, and optimism. It was the single most pivotal turning point in the carefree attitude of an untarnished soul.
In my mind, I can still take myself back to the feeling of leaning against that stone-cold pillar. I jokingly comment today that I might still be there with my hands folded if not for the fast exodus of my fellow victims
Dash Inspirations by Linda Ellis - LindaEllis.life
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