How could life possibly get worse?

This is a nightmare I’ll never escape, a bad dream from which I’ll never wake. The scar under my fingers throbs with pain as the sound coming from my phone yanks me back in time to that awful day—the fights with my parents, the disappointment of being told what I couldn’t do, the meanness I felt, the trip down from the pass that ended almost as soon as it began when the snow on the mountain gave way and roared down the steep slope, engulfing our SUV and rolling it over and over… Waking in a hospital later to the physical pain of being broken in a dozen places, and the emotional pain of losing my parents, feeling wracked with guilt because it was my fault.

I relive it all in the space of an instant as the audio message “from Dad” plays. When the sounds emanating from the phone stop, I’m filled with growing dread, a different kind of horror. The voices in the sound clip are familiar, those of the men who are supposed to be protecting me, guarding me from forces we don’t yet understand, but which might reach some of the highest pinnacles of the U.S. government. And that’s just too crazy to comprehend, an idea that we shouldn’t even speak out loud if we don’t want to get locked up in a funny farm, or worse, “disappeared” as if we never existed.

It’s been eighteen months since that horrible day, the day I lost both my parents and my sight…