A Life’s Heartache

Scatters of illuminant colors light up the calm hollow sky. Heat shatters the glass windows that covered a mesh type fabric which would help keep the bugs out, and it melted. 2:30 AM ; screams of a girl echo through the billows of smoke that are pouring out of the crooks and crannies of the half burnt down house, as she is carried out; cradled in the woman’s arms that saved her life. The yellow of her uniform has disappeared under the black soot that has woven into each fiber of the heat protected suit. She immediately slips off the top of the suit by un-popping the clasps then pulling down the zipper, like a mother sheep getting its wool shaved off for the first time. The fire fighter and the little girl are gasping for clean oxygen. The woman named Michelle asks, “where is your family?” the little girl just keeps yelping in exhaustion and affliction as she folds her head to the right and then to the left, as if anyone would have stayed to make sure she was alive; then says “they don’t give a s*** about me.”
Over half of her body is scorched and her skin is bubbling up like a pot of sizzling grits that have been on the stove for over 8 hours. If you were to touch the skin that is still attached it would just droop over. Ally Rae (the child) is laid gently onto a special burnt victim stretcher. Ally Rae’s brother is sitting calm, smoking a joint on the porch stoop next door; as she is weeping in pain and loneliness as what used to be her caverness house but is now ashes of no-good childhood memories. Not one nosey bystander sticking their nose into other people’s business: any news reporters, no police, only Ally Rae, Michelle, some fire fighters and Jay Paul (Ally Rae’s brother).


The silencing fire cracks as it lowers to the be-withered scorched dry red dirt. Sirens disappear through the wavelength of the wind.
Ally Rae is immediately transported to the closest burn unit hospital while she suffers the effects of the fire. Laying there on the bed images of the fire flash by, as she looks into a mirror and sees the reflection; a torn apart face and a broken heart. Of what used to be her freckles on her pail face were now a blob of white a bloody skin. Her face was drained of all pigment. Each freckle was swiped from her face like a vicious starving group of nine year old soccer players after a game at a pizza party; when a child peals off the pepperoni. Whose choice is it to destroy such a beautiful creation? The stretcher rumbles and squeaks as ally fights to surrender the pain into the mirror, praying for peace and closure. Her hands clenched to the metal railing and tears drain out of her blue ocean like eyes.

The next morning…

The sun comes up over the fields of wheat and corn. Smokey grey fog covers each stalk to the top like a mist of water falling over a wave as it plummets to peace. The slums of Montgomery Alabama are empty. A man is crawling out of an old withered musty box down the alley. The stores, vacant with 2X4 covering each barred up window. A group of manna-be country boy thugs strut their stuff at the yellow corner light, throwing dice and smoking cigarettes. Their jeans are torn and their suspenders are dangling like a little girl with curly pig tales hanging upside down on a jungle gym. Not one distant tire mark woven into the concrete road. Looking down Main Street you can see distant smoke blowing off of what used to be the living room of Ally Rae’s house. Only the right side of the houses frame is still intact but scorched.
Before is the house was blazed by one of her moms low life acquaintances, lived there was: Ally Rae Fields and her so-called mother who is a 24 hour non-stop drug addict, one blood related brother and three other brothers from three different men Ally never met. The Fields are referred to the stereotype of white trash. Random men walk in and out as if it was truck stop. Linda, Ally Rae’s mother doesn’t even know half the time that she has so many kids. All of the kids but Ally Rae, twelve and Jay-Paul, sixteen Ally Rae’s blood related brother are trying not to follow down the same crooked coke snorting, heroin shooting, pill poppin bumpy road; except Jay-Paul who is slowly getting sucked in to the black whole of nothingness.