CHAPTER THREE

When I woke up that morning, breakfast was on my mind. As it was every day I got off the bed because my mother had a knack for making the whole house smell like whatever she was cooking. That dreadful morning was no different, I could smell the bake she made on the baking stone, the eggs she scrambled and the sweet sweet cocoa tea she always made just right. In all my food haze I didn’t hear the arguing at first, the ridiculous cursing hit me when I stepped off the last step and appeared in the kitchen. First thing I noticed was that the television was on an obscenely high level. The noise was drowning and like a symphony of my coming doom and gloom. My brothers were just walking aimlessly around the house, my mother’s voice was getting at an insanely high pitch which only happens when she passes angry and skips right straight to pissed. I knew that angry wail because I was on the end of that wail so many times my heart always picked up pace to help with my fight or flight response in getting out of dodge or what ever instrument she was going to use to beat us senseless with for whatever stupid thing we did.

But this time it wasn’t us she was cursing and wailing at, it was my father who was looking at her with such contempt out of his good eye. Years before when my brothers and I were just dreams in his balls sack he got shot right above his right eye over some money some thieves was trying to take from him during a card game, leaving him with a Mexican drug lord face since he spends all day in the sun for his job. What kicked my heart rate up a notch was that he actually started to yell back at her. At the time that was the scariest thing I had ever seen or heard. My father never raised his voice, he was the epitome of calm, even when he caught us using our baby brother’s baby powder to skate on the ground or when we lit old newspapers on fire and threw it over by the neighbors just for shits and giggles. My brother’s and I couldn’t move as we stared at the two people we love the most in the world call each other names. The rest was a blur, all I remember is my mother taking a hold of my arm and tugging me all over the house as she changed me and my brother and threw clothes in bags at the same time. Ever the multi-tasker. When I finally came out of my shock we were sitting in front of the house, about nine bags of clothes around us and our father on the second floor looking down on us. The later and later it got the more agitated I got so I hopped up to go back inside and then the death grip was back on my arm.
‘Sit down here, I tell you to get up from dey!" she yelled at me.
That’s when I decided to stop waiting for her to come to her senses and let us go back inside and began to finally act like a child. I began to cry my eyes out. Utter waste of time because she didn’t bat an eye. About an hour passed again and I could have seen my brothers resolve in obeying our mother waning and they were getting ready to bolt when a car pulled up. They probably would have made it too.

As a child your imagination is something that could often run away with you and when you get older and you bring up the memory again you realize you must have been scared to death to have thought up something like that. What I am referring to in this situation is my grandmother. When the car pulled up in front of us, she was the one who unfolded herself from the passenger seat but what I saw was no elderly woman, I literally saw the bloody grim reaper. Trick of the light I said, it was getting dark was my excuse, I was hungry, I have used each excuse to rationalize what I saw. The black cloak, scythe and the rumbling in her chest when she spoke, "I have come for you."

I’m just playing, she didn’t say that, I can’t tell you what she said because I had a mini black out when she grabbed my hand and dragged me into the front seat with her and placed me on her lap. When I came to we were flying down the highway, my mother in the back still huffing and puffing and I’m leaning on the sharpest breast I have ever felt.