Pillar: From the Book
Content note: This post describes a child witnessing domestic violence between her parents. Nothing graphic is depicted, but the subject matter may be difficult for some readers. If this isn’t a good moment for you, it’s okay to skip it — Part 2 of this post can stand on its own.
In short: This is the opening scene of “When Unicorns Don’t Fly” — a memory, told from a four-year-old’s point of view, of an ordinary family dinner that turned violent, and the silence that followed it. It’s the first of two posts: this one holds the memory itself; Part 2 unpacks what it reveals about how children survive homes like this one.
The Scene
She doesn’t remember what set it off that night. Maybe nothing did. Maybe it was the kind of evening where the day’s small frustrations had simply been looking for somewhere to land, and dinner was where they landed.
What she does remember is the food — how it went, in an instant, from sitting quietly on the table to being thrown across the room. And then the sound that came after it: a hand meeting a face, sharp and unmistakable.
She was four, maybe five. Old enough to know that hands were meant to hold you, not hit someone you loved. Too young to understand why they sometimes did both.
She and her sister watched from the stairs, the way they always did — not moving, not speaking, because some rules don’t need to be taught out loud. Stay small. Stay quiet. Don’t be seen. Their father left soon after, the front door loud enough to rattle the frames on the wall. And then came the part she remembers most clearly, even now: not the shouting, but what came after it. The quiet. Her mother, alone downstairs, making the evidence disappear — wiping, sweeping, resetting the table — until dinner could be served again as if nothing had happened at all.
Nobody spoke of it afterward. The house went back to looking like a family lived there, ordinary and clean. But her body had already started keeping a record the rest of her wouldn’t have words for until much later: that peace in that house was never guaranteed, only borrowed, one evening at a time.
A Little Context, If You’re New Here
This scene opens the memoir “When Unicorns Don’t Fly,” written by Rooh. The child in this scene is the author, around four or five years old, in a home that — from the outside — looked entirely ordinary: a stable house, a good school, family photos where everyone was smiling. You don’t need to have read anything else to follow this post. Every “From the Book” entry is written to stand on its own.
What Comes Next
A scene like this raises an obvious question: what does witnessing something like this actually do to a child, underneath the silence that follows it? That’s exactly what Part 2 gets into — the psychology of what this dinner-table moment reveals, and why the quiet afterward can be its own kind of harm. Continue to Part 2: What “When Dinner Turned to Shrapnel” Reveals
Frequently Asked Questions
Is “When Unicorns Don’t Fly” a true story? Yes. It’s a memoir by Rooh, combining personal experience with research on childhood and adolescent depression.
Does this chapter contain graphic content? This particular scene describes a slap and thrown food, without further physical detail. Later chapters in the book address more intense material, including self-harm and assault, and are marked with their own content notes.
Why do children go silent after witnessing violence at home? Children often freeze and stay quiet because they’ve learned, without being told directly, that intervening or reacting can make a volatile situation worse. Part 2 of this post explores this pattern in more depth.