The angel screamed and the devil cried

"By sundown we came to a hidden village where all the air was still". It was cold. That is the first sensation that comes to mind when I summon up this memory. The room was cold. In one corner of the room, I saw my mother. Even though she was crying, the tears did little to mask her beauty. Perhaps it was only because she was the most important woman in my life, but even then many people said that she was pretty, even beautiful. It would not be the first time I would see her like that. However, nothing scared me, and in a cruel sense, intrigued me more than the woman who stood a mere five feet away from me. “Give him back!” The sound of her voice piercing the air still haunts me sometimes, the sound of a woman whose last desperate grasp at hope was cruelly destroyed by a much stronger entity. "And no sound met our tired ears, save for the sorry drip of rain from blackened trees and the melancholy song of swing gates."
In the other corner of the room, I saw part of the strong entity, my father. Dressed in a black suit, at six feet tall, he towered above the other people in the room, a god among insects. The god stood as if he were in shock, however. Regret and pleasure fought for control as his face spoke volumes about his feelings, and yet I still thirsted for answers. "Then through a broken pane some of us saw a dead bird in a rusting cage, still pressing his battered breast against the bars, his beak wide open". I believe that deep down inside he regretted what he had done; for all his flaws, he was a man of honor, and no one had told him it would have ended like this. This was not how a gentleman handled affairs. Yet the other side of him, the primitive, bestial side, reveled in the total defeat of his opponent, to hurt her as much as she had hurt him. I saw him standing there, one moment a six foot wreck of a man, the next as majestic and terrible as the sun. The incident changed him. He would never smile with any warmth after this, and his jokes had a cynical and cruel twist to them. "And as we hurried through the weed-grown street, a gaunt dog started up from some dark place and shambled off on legs as thin as sticks into the wood, to die at last in peace". A well-built man with charm I wished I had inherited, women flocked to him afterwards, but he turned them away, or they realized that there was a gaping hole in him, a wound that would never heal however much they tried to love him.
Holding me on her lap I remember, was my grandmother. Though already at about 70 years of age then, she was still the matriarch of the family, a woman whose age had not diminished the aura of power that clung to her like the musty scent of the perfume she used. Disapproving of the marriage from the first day, she would later transfer her dislike of my mother to me, but her love of my father as well. Even after so many years, I still cannot tell whether she likes or dislikes me. My friends have summed it up as a love-hate relationship, and it’s the view with which I go with. I looked up at her face one time, and could have sworn that the ghost of a smile whispered across her face. The look chilled me. It was a smile I that I would become all too familiar with. There was no warmth in it. "No one had told us victory was like this; not one amongst us would have eaten bread before he’d filled the mouth of the grey child that sprawled, stiff as stone, before the shattered door".
People said I was too young, at the tender age of five, to remember something like this. From a logical view, the adults are right, they always are. But I will not forget this, not this memory. People say I can’t remember it. I was too young. I make myself remember. “The custody is awarded to Mr. Lee…” As my grandma held my hand and walked out of the room, I heard the angel scream and saw the devil crying behind us. The courtroom was cold. But not as cold as the smile on the matriarch’s face. "There was not one who did not think of home".