There is only one light in my house. If I'm being technical, it's not even in my house. It hangs from a hole in the plaster above the peeling grey-green paint of the doorframe. The wires connecting it to whatever is inside the plaster sheets are visible and fraying, threatening to turn anyone who makes a single wrong step into fried human. There's no other electricity in my house. Just the flickering, dismal floodlight that barely sheds enough light to check a watch.

I'm more than used to the dark, though. As a kid, I couldn't bear it. My mother would routinely tuck me into my bed, her subtle golden locks framing her elegant smile as she told me goodnight. I would lay there, frozen, anticipating the next movements; she would flick the light switch, my vision would dissipate. The walls around me would start to creep in and my imagination would run as erratically as my heart pounding against my ribcage.

And then I would scream. I would scream until I couldn't feel my throat. The screaming usually barred the sound of my father yelling at my mother over the commotion I was causing. It deafened me to the sound of his palm connecting with her cheek, and her falling back against my wall. My father quickly learned that the screaming ceased once his fist found my face. That induced the tears, and the gut-wrenching sobs. But they were diminished into an almost silent whimper as I was dragged from my bed and his belt was brought down on my body.

That was when I was five. I finally gave into my fight against the dark around the time I turned nine. I figured that less pain came from letting my fear silently embrace me than copping the anger of my drunken father. By the time I'd reached eleven, the darkness had let go of its hold on my lungs and nestled into a special spot in my heart. It had become my escape.

My pencil ardently scrapes at the sketchbook resting upon the splintering deck, its products illuminated by the semi-regular flickering of the light. Accompanied by a string of bitter hisses, the wind hurls its blows in my direction. The walls containing my younger brother and sister imbue far worse pain into my body than the vitriolic atmosphere, however. Those walls stand silently with their arms by their sides as my father completes his nightly routine, leaving me pressed to the cold floor. They then embrace his inebriated form as he stumbles into his makeshift shed, closing his door to the rest of the world. The candlelight evident beneath the door is the sole indication that he isn't yet out cold. Safety will never reside within those walls, not while my father is present.

My face twists as a yawn breaks across my expression. I bring myself to my feet, tucking my sketchbook beneath my hoodie. Thickly weaved throughout the air around me, the smoke is an unceasing warning that Australia is presently on fire. Bushfires already litter the coast and summer is still yet to befall us. Sirens scream in the distance, filling the well-established silence that claims my neighbourhood. As I move away from the cracking structure of the house that I and my siblings inhabit, the smoke in the air grows thinner. Maybe the wind has changed again.

Another yawn encapsulates my countenance and I blink hard in an attempt to ward off my impending drowsiness. Pain dashes through the left side of my face as I do so, courtesy of the black eye awarded to me by my father in the previous hours of the night. Expelling a gush of air from my lungs, I break into a run down the middle of the 'street with no streetlights'. I could lie down in the middle of the road and I'd wake undisturbed. People simply don't trust this area.

My father is resolute in his conjecture attesting that I run to rid myself of my problems and all that I'm afraid of. Weak is what he claims I am. Pathetic, weak, and selfish. Even if avoidance were the reason I run, the hypocrisy is uncanny as he has drunk away each problem he's ever had to face. Perhaps he simply has some very unconventional methods of professing his need for help.

The sirens haven't stopped wailing; they blare through my ears as if quickly approaching. I brush the thought from my mind, condemning the silence for my split second of paranoia. But the sirens don't relent, and within moments, the street morphs into a landscape of blue and red flashing lights. I seek refuge on the side of the road as two red trucks topped by ladders sing admonitions for all the neighbourhood to hear as they speed by.

There are only three occupied houses on my street. One belongs to a hunched, grey-haired little man who never ventures past the front doorstep. The second's inhabitants are unknown. The only evidence of their existence is the light in the top left window. Sometimes, I swear I can hear screams coming from the oversized cabin. The third and final is my house. The two caravans stuck together with dad's poorly manufactured shed annexed to the rear of the structure stand shakily as if at a touch they might collapse.

Maybe the hunched guy had heard dad yelling and smashing things and called the police again. But that wouldn't explain the fire trucks. I begin moving again, this time back in the direction I'd come. Both an ambulance and a police car hurtle by as I run, the sirens blaring and at full speed only watering the anxiety cultivating in the empty pit of my stomach.

Maybe they've finally obtained reason to break into the quiet house. Maybe whoever lives there really is a wifebeater—as my younger brother Tyler hypothesises—and is being detained for the murder of the poor, albeit fictitious, woman. Maybe the hunched guy commenced an arson rampage and began burning all the decrepit and uninhabited houses accomodating the tiny neighbourhood.

And then I see it. My heart forms a stifling lump inside my throat as I stop dead in my tracks. It's the most likely out of all the possibilities I could've concocted in my head, but it is by far the worst of them. The quiet house is still quiet. The hunched man merely lingers on his front doorstep. Instead, the emergency vehicles surround my house, attempting to control the blaze that has consumed it.