My Unabridged Upbringing

That Day

I can't remember anything from that day. Maybe my memory deliberately left it there, or maybe it was simply because I was too young. But to my best ability, I will give you what I believe from all the stories I have heard, to be the truth:

After a previous fight and vicious beating from my father, my morning sat in the bathroom massaging her bruises with rubbing alcohol. This was a normal occurrence. Later on in my life I would no longer be able to count the stories on my hand of when my father would lay his hands on my mother. One day they told me a story about how he was going to beat her and she was so frightened that she scaled the wall like a cat to escape his grasp. She would take us in the night while he was out and try to start a new life somewhere different. But he would always find her, they said. Once he broke a door entirely off of its hinges, only to find us all cowering in the corner , looking like a family of raccoons being discovered after hiding for so long. He would always drag my mother back. He told her she could leave. But not without my younger brother and me, as we were his children. She refused. My mother battled the beatings to keep our family together.

This day was like the others. After a beating she sat on the bathroom massaging her bruises with rubbing alcohol, taking to my sister who was six at the time, along with me at two years old. I was oblivious to the conversation as my mother told my sister how tired she was of fighting with my father, and how sore and beat down she was. She spoke about pure exhaustion from her mind to her body, her constant fear and her lack of will to live. She told my sister that it was her responsibility to take care of me. To lead me. To ensure that no harm would come my way. Why was my mother saying all of this now? Why was she telling my sister to look out for me like she wouldn't be there to? After a few moments my father burst into the bathroom and continued an argument that they had just been having. This argument was about a blue rug.

A blue rug.

My father was holding matches in his hand.

The long old fashioned matches. Possibility from the scene of the crime.

Apparently they had a fight about the rug before. My father didn't know where she had gotten the rug. And she must have not wanted to tell him, or maybe she didn't give him the answer that he felt was sufficient enough. This blue rug was on the floor in our room. We had been sleeping on the brand new blue rug because I had peed on the mattress and my mother had taken the mattress outside and burned it. Maybe that's where he got the matches from. There was more arguing. Their anger and voices escalated. My sister was emotional and I'm sure it was effecting me as well, except that I can't remember anything from this day. Maybe there was more hitting, I can't confirm, but there is what I know. There was fire. Fire that engulfed the woman that gave birth to me quickly. The fire came from matches, but was my father still holding them? The rubbing alcohol spread the fire all over my mothers body but soon was burned through and the fire began to lick and then eat at her skin. She jumped up and ran out of the house with my father on her heel. I'm sure there was screaming. The commotion must have been loud enough to alert the neighbors. Another man quickly came and the two tried to smother flame but I guess it was just too late.

My mother's body was limp. Charred. She died days later, not even her children knowing. The only witnesses, two children under the age of seven years old. There was nothing we could have done. And it was over. My mother was gone. The mother of five children left the world as quickly as the fire engulfed her. A sense of urgency came over the entire neighborhood. Someone called the police. Someone ran to hide their drugs. Someone heard the screaming and stopped cooking to come outside. Someone was looking down at my mothers dead body. Someone was screaming because they just witnessed something horrific. Someone was wondering what was going to happen to her children.

Two of our cousins ran to get our grandmother, who I assume did not live too far as I am told she lived about four blocks away. They ran the entire way taking our older brother and my older sister, leaving my younger brother and me in the house by ourselves because they could carry all of us at the same time and we would've taken the longest to move. How different my life would've been if they had taken us first. Or if only one had gone while the other remained with all of the children in our house. They were only preteens, they had no idea what that split second decision would do to us for the rest of our lives. I don't know where my father was at this point. They didn't know where he and the other man had run off. When my cousins came back for my brother and I were were gone. The door was ajar and my toes, clothes and all belongings of my entire left were left in my absence.

Apparently my father called his sister. She lived in the West , a more suburban area. She got in her Lexus and drove into the ghetto in which we resided, she ascended the one step into the home and picked up a toddler and a baby, who wouldn't be found by their family for sixteen years.