Read Broken Wings 02 Midnight Flight for Free Online

was an auto garage tool salesman and my
mama worked as a waitress in one dump after another, drinking up mast of what she made and sometimes not coming home until morning. It was one thing to remember it all, to think about it, but another to actually put it in writing. It made me more angry than ashamed to see it in black and white. Perhaps that was Dr. Foreman's purpose: to get us to hate who we were, who we are. I suppose I couldn't blame her. Why else
would we work on changing ourselves?
It was funny though how tears came into my
eyes after I began to describe our apartment in that
rat-infested building, described my room. the crippled
kitchen with the stove that worked when it was in the
mood, and the living room with the threadbare rug
where Daddy sat and watched television alone so
many nights. Why would I cry over and long for a
return to the life I used to hate? Why would I want to
be back in that two-by-four room of mine where I
could hear pipes groaning at night like someone with
a bellyache, and people in other apartments yelling at
each other and clawing the walls the way prisoners
going mad might?
I wasn't in a good place to grow up. Even as a
little girl. I knew bad things happened in our building.
Someone I only knew as Mr. Ratter died of a drug
overdose in the apartment directly below ours. It was the first time I saw a dead person. I stood on the stairway and watched them taking him out an a stretcher, the sheet over his whole body. The police said the apartment stank. He had been dead for nearly a week, but he had no relatives in Atlanta. Only in his
mid-thirties, he was already dead.
That was when I first understood what Daddy
meant when he said we were living in a cemetery. The
doors of the apartments should look more like
tombstones and read their names and born in 19__,
died 20__. Rest its peace because that's the only
peace you'll have.
No wonder I didn't want to come home nights
or stay there on weekends. No wonder I took
advantage of Mama being at work and staying out to
all hours and Daddy being on the road, away from
home. I shouldn't have been blamed for that. Anyone
living like I was living, seeing the things I saw, would
have done the same thing.
The only excitement and happiness I had were
what I had with my friends. So we smoked and
shoplifted and drank at parties. So what? We didn't
hurt people badly, did we? Well, maybe we hurt
ourselves somewhat, but we weren't on anyone's Most
Wanted list. Teachers barely tolerated us, were happy when we didn't bother them, and swept us along like so much dust from one room to another, one teacher
to another, as if everyone was to share the burden. Yes. I wrote in the notebook, it's true I did get
arrested more than once. I was put on probation. I did
violate it and I was in danger of going to a real prison.
Yes. I knew why Daddy felt he had to place me with
my uncle and aunt after Mama ran off with someone
and deserted us. but I also knew my aunt and uncle
never wanted me and were surely relieved when I got
myself in new trouble and ran away. My aunt could
claim she was right about me: I was hopeless and now
she had a good excuse for getting rid of me forever. I described it all, how I was cornered into
hurting that boy, how I was arrested for it and decided
to run off, how disappointed I was in Mama when I
found her in that clinic, and how betrayed I felt when
my uncle tricked me and got me taken here. I was
never as mean to anyone as they were to me. I wrote. I
don't deserve this.
As to my fears, I couldn't come up with much
except what I had feared when I was a little girl and
could actually hear the rats scratching their way
through the walls, visiting different apartments as if
the whole place were a mall for rats who could shop in this one's kitchen cabinets and then another and pass the news on to the world of rats out there: Come to Phoebe Elder's home. Her mother is a slob. Lots to eat on the floor and counters, and she's so out of it most