3
695 Words
I wake with my mother standing over me, screaming my name. “Franki! Oh my God, Franki! What have you done? What have you done?”
I hate that she takes the Lord’s name in vain. I’ve told her that before, but she keeps forgetting. Or she doesn’t care.
I feel heavy. My chest hurts. The pressure sucking on my lungs is like the industrial car vacuum they have down at the good car wash, and not the crappy one down on Oak Street. I look down at my chest and see Lucas halfway on top of me. There’s red everywhere. Blood sticky on my skin. Dried on my neck. Soaking my tank top.
I scream. At least I think I do. The sound is hoarse and foreign like an asthmatic in the middle of an attack. I push, kicking myself out from underneath him. Finally, scooting backward on my butt, I take my first full breath in what feels like forever.
My mother’s sobbing. Screaming things like what am I going to do? We’re all dead. I’ve killed us both.
I want to tell her to be quiet. To let me think. None of this makes any sense. On some level I register that Lucas is dead, but not me, not my mother, not anyone else. But I do understand that I’ve killed a man. Stabbed him in the belly and in the back, and from the amount of blood, numerous times.
Think about it later.
“He was trying. Trying to… He was going to…” My speech is halting like a car in stop-and-go traffic—gas, brake, gas, brake.
My mother shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.”
Then my mother says a name. A name that snaps me to, pulls the world back into the perspective of who I am and what I am—a nobody. And from a mother who dates dangerous men.
“Marcus,” she says again. “Marcus is going to kill us.”
And even in this shocking, hovering-above-looking-down-on-myself experience, I know she’s right.
“Baby,” she says, kneeling in front of me and grabbing my face like she did when I was little when I skinned my knee or had a bad dream. “You’ve got to go. You’ve got to get out of here.”
I nod, but not exactly sure what I’m agreeing to.
“Baby, you’ve got to get out of here.” Her face oozes desperation. Her exotic coloring that have people guessing at her heritage from anywhere between black, Spanish, and Arabic is now sickly white. Her slanted green eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot. Her usual dark lips are pulled into an ugly arc that makes her, for once, look all of her forty years. I think about telling her to change her face or it might stay that way, but it’s hard to find the words as she’s pulling on me and shoving a pair of jeans into my hand. “Put these on.”
I stumble once, twice, but finally get them on.
She throws me a hoody. It bounces off my chest and falls to the ground. We both stare at it until she picks it up and dresses me like she hasn’t done since I was three years old.
“Where are your shoes, baby?”
I shake my head and swallow. “Out there.” I point toward the still open window. Rain pours down outside, wetting my bedspread and soaking my pillow. When had it started to rain?
“Here,” my mother says, pushing a wad of cash into my hand. Her tips from the night no doubt. “You need to go someplace Marcus can’t find you. Wait until this whole thing has blown over. I’ll take care of things here. I’ll say it was a rival gang member. I’ll say that he was drunk. Oh God…” Her fingers comb her hair, and then find her mouth as she begins to bite her thumbnail. A nervous habit that I’ve copied myself.
Not now, though. Now, I just stand stock-still.
- Writer
