DISEASE

"Some nights never end. They live forever in the silence between heartbeats."

Mun was ten when the fight happened—the one that cracked her childhood in half.

Her parents had always fought. Loud voices behind thin walls. Plates crashing. Doors slamming. But this one was different. It was colder. Sharper. The kind of fight where no one wins.

It started with whispers and ended with the front door slamming shut. Her mother stormed out first, then her father. They didn't say where they were going. They didn't say when they'd return. And they didn't look back.

Mun stood at the doorway, clutching her baby brother Nix, who was just a toddler. The night swallowed them. The lightbulb flickered above their heads, and outside, thunder rumbled low and angry.

She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She simply sat on the floor with Nix wrapped in a towel, his tiny body pressed against hers.

All night, she kept whispering to him, "It's okay. I'm here. I won't leave." Over and over. As if saying it enough times could protect him from the way the world had just cracked open.

The wind howled. The shadows danced on the walls. Every creak, every noise, felt like danger. Mun didn't sleep. She couldn't. Not when Nix might wake up and cry. Not when the silence could swallow them whole.

By morning, her parents came back—as if nothing had happened. Her mother went straight to the kitchen. Her father avoided her eyes.

But something inside Mun had changed. Something that never fully healed.

Even at nineteen, that night still lived in her. The fear. The chill. The realization that she and Nix were never truly safe.

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