Zi September

Prompt One - The Boy With Two Mom's

(Please forgive any and all spelling and gramar errors. This will eventually be rewritten. Thank you.)

Your character is given a list of names - why?

My journey wasn't pleasant or short, but it wasn't long and torturous either. I was alone, sure, but I was focused on the bigger picture, aiming for family, community. It wasn't as if I had swarms of people to help out, in fact, I was quite lacking in that department. I'd ask you to guess what cliche exchange of events tumbled and clashed together, forcing me to where I stood now - reading, and rereading the foreign white letters that dominated my rearview mirror - but of course you couldn't, no one could. At least, not anyone I'd met so far.

But people are like that when you're living proof something they've deemed as "unnatural" actually works. People, believe it or not, are biased, poised, and hard headed animals driven by greed and quite frankly after the trip I've had, I'm almost ashamed to be one.

December 2nd, 2013, I returned home from school to find my house completely empty. Had my family had friends, I would've called, but since we were a rather special case, we were somewhat limited in the ways of society. So I went next-door to our neighbors who sneered down at me like the scum on the bottom of their handyman's shoes and asked them if they'd seen my parents. The neighbor woman scoffed and replied with a rather blunt, "No, and thank the Lord!" Before slamming the door in my face. I remember wondering then how her horse could be so high, yet she lived in a trailer park. But my mother's had long since taught me the art of silence.

I did my homework alone that night, locked up, fed our cat, reheated spaghetti from the night before and fell asleep on the couch, watching television. At three, I heard a panicked knocking at the door, Scruffles (the cat) seemed utterly fascinated by the blue and red flashing lights that lit our rather small trailer. I was petrified it was my mother's, angry and upset that I'd slept and ate on the couch again and they'd called the cops to prove a point. Looking back, it didn't really seem like them, but then it did. It probably didn't help I was high.

Irregardless, I ran. Ran as far away from the lights and the noise and the banging as I could and I hid in my closet - cowering, as I assume they'd say, had anyone known. When it came time for school, I got ready and slid out the window, taking a walk through the woods before coming around the side of the trailer, acting surprised by the police who'd presumably camped out in the lawn. One, bald and fat, was talking to the same neighborhood who'd slammed my face in the door meer hours before, sobbing and carrying on about something I had zero interest in. And then it happened. The shorter, skinnier one saw me, and, with a tap on his partners shoulder, came over.

I'd denied all accusations of being home (still fearing the punishment of sleeping and eating in incorrect rooms), but they knew better (in other words, the neighbor ratted me out), so I came clean. And then they took me to their station, bought me breakfast, and told me my parents had died that night in a car crash. A simi had blatantly T-boned them. What they didn't tell me was that the only witness had then vandalized the scene, spraying "DIKES" on the side of their car in yellow paint before dragging the dead simi driver from his post in the wreckage. They never found the violator.

Actually, the police never did a lot of anything on that case. They didn't even help me, they went and shipped me off to an orphanage in another country, and I'd only now returned. Graduated, at the top of my class. Over $3,000 in savings, an abusive foster dad on my heels. Unfortunately for him, he'd hugely underestimated me, and was about eleven towns over.

So here I was, two years later, hoping to salvage the only bit of family I had left, symbolic of my hope in humanity. So, with another pull from my rapidly dwindling cigarette, I stood from the car, only able to stare at the words before me while my stomach plummeted and my chest swelled all at once. Pride and anxiety, what a terrifyingly freeing combination.