The Day the Man came for his Child

[Harriot Izser]

The sound of the door coming down woke me, a man stood in the door, shouting a name. I recognised the name but didn't know why it mattered.
The man started coming towards me. He looked at me closely with a expression of determination on his face, until he saw my eyes and the determined face turned to anger.
His right arm came up and I saw it had a knife in it. I screamed and turned onto my back.
A pressure came down from my left shoulder to my right hip, then the pressure turned into raw hurt. I screamed as I felt blood running down my back.
I heard the man struggling as someone came over to me and whispered into my ear. "Are you alive?" the voice said. He sounded relieved when I turned my head to look at him.
But the pain was still there and when the man tried to wipe away the blood, and touched the long cut, the pain tripled. I screamed and the man immediately took the cloth away.
I heard a voice, a muffled voice and realised it was coming from a mobile phone. I had never called it a cell before.
The man had called an ambulance, I smiled but immediately frowned in pain as the cut got touched again.
Suddenly everything went black, but the pain was still there.

---

I opened my eyes, but found the light too bright. I carefully opened my eyes again, the light making my vision go multi-colored. I determindley kept my eyes open until I could see enough.
I was in a hospital, in the childrens high dependancy part of the hospital. I looked around to find my father asleep on the chair beside me. I smiled and tried to sit up, a pain in my back suddenly shrieked and I stopped to find a nurse beside me, looking worried.
"Are you alright Harriot?" she said, a worried expression on her face. "She's going to make me lie back down" I thought to myself as I looked at her.
I nodded, and she sighed with relief. "Now, let's sit you back down and wake up your father."
She carefully pushed me back to a lying position and shook my father awake.
"Wahh..." he said before he realised where he was. When he saw me looking at him he sighed and smiled at me.
"Har.Har, Har, Harrity Har. Do you realise how afraid I was when they phoned to say you were in hospital? But never mind how I feel, just worry about yourself."
He stood up and leaned over the bed to give me a kiss on the cheek. "You're coming with me to New York, and no fussing about money and all that. I've got a permanent flat on the banks of the Atlantic."
I just stared at him, until it finally penetrated my mind.
I was going to New York City.