Day 1,580

Starting out at a new school is one of the most terrifying things a child can experience. They lose all sense of who they were and where they stood among their peers and these are not easy to regain. Starting a new school is daunting enough with parents in tow and even worse without.

And that's where we begin today - a small child waiting outside of the headmaster's office at 08:30AM sharp. The bench was as sturdy as the rest of the school and almost as old, ornately carved along the back and crudely carved along the armrests where restless arms scraped at the varnish to inscribe their initials instead.

The child was supposed to be meeting the headmaster to be introduced to the layout of the school and to receive their schedule but not it was 08:45AM and not a single soul was in sight. An old mobile was cautiously removed from an almost empty rucksack to double check the time and date. Both were correct and yet the child was still so very alone.

The child decided that when the clock showed 09:30AM they would walk home- anything delayed over an hour just simply isn't happening, as their mother was fond of saying. Time dragged by like the overflowing trawl net, the seconds reluctantly scraped by and just before the hour had struck, the child saw someone.

He looked older but barely, dressed in the school's autumnal reds and greens and frantically gesturing from the far end of the hallway as his eyes darted around wildly. "Quickly, this way!" the boy loudly whispered, "He's coming and you'll be right in his way!"

The child looked worried, hurriedly grabbing their rucksack and darting over to the boy who grabbed their hand to pull them towards a storage room. He wedged several boxes underneath the handle before backing to to greet the child with that naive trust the young so often have.

He went to give his name only to snap his mouth shut as the sound of a wooden cane striking the floor grew closer and closer. The child knew it would be the headmaster and that they must meet the headmaster and this boy was interfering.

This simply would not do.

The wooden cane kept coming closer and closer and closer, polished wood striking polished wood until it struck something wet. Something red. Something leaking out from the other side of a storage room where a child had decided to remove the interruption and had just finished removing the boxes beneath the handle when the door was opened by a sharp tug and light spilled from the many eyes of the headmaster onto the drenched pile of meat on the floor and the child standing beside it.