Miranda Allen

A New Beginning

            As I lay there staring at the white paint on the ceiling, I suddenly realized that my jaw was sore from clenching my teeth together so hard, and I forced myself to relax it. The paint was beginning to peel away from the wood underneath, piece by piece, until eventually it would not be white anymore but a warm brown instead. And staring at it, I began to take several long, deep breaths to prepare myself to go see why my stepfather was calling my name from the other side of the house.

            I looked over to where Michael sat playing in the floor of my bedroom with a toy car.

“I’ll be back in a minute.  Just play with your toys and be good okay?” I said.

            He didn’t respond but instead looked very engrossed in what he was doing.  It was obvious to me that he was a very imaginative and intelligent child but, for some reason, he simply couldn’t do well in school.  Every year was the same story.

“He is an excellent student, but he just doesn’t want to do his work.” is what his teachers would all say.  And, of course, they would always ask my mother about his home life, which she continually lied through her teeth about.

            My mom’s third marriage, twelve years earlier, had come as a surprise to everyone. It had happened fast and rather suddenly. My older sister Mina and I had met the man only twice, and then we were suddenly living with him and expecting a baby brother. His name was Charles and, at 6’2” and about 300 pounds, he was already pretty intimidating to two little girls.  When the yelling and cursing started, the intimidation quickly turned into fear and the following years were spent with us being constantly afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.  Strangely enough, Charles was very much against physical punishment and, while Mama, Mina and I were quite glad for this, the verbal lashings and emotional abuse only got worse with time.  However, it seemed that Charles focused the majority of his attention on poor Mama.  It became the norm to hear him yelling and cursing at her, calling her stupid, and throwing whatever was in reach.

            While wondering what I had done wrong this time, I apprehensively made my way down the hall.  He looked up when I walked into the room, and I immediately felt my stomach tighten into a hundred knots.

“Help me fix this,” he said as he indicated some piece of machinery in front of him.

            He was endlessly working on all sorts of things and always making me help him when he knew I didn’t know anything at all about those kinds of things.  What he was working on now could’ve come from a fridge, an air conditioner, or a vehicle for all I knew.  And, with Charles, there was no telling where it came from.  He had never been able to keep a job for long in the eight years since my mother had married him, and money was always a scarce thing. 

            I distinctly remember one summer in Houston when it was scorching hot and so humid that you couldn’t walk outside without breaking into a sweat.  Charles had quit his job and we couldn’t afford to pay the electricity bill for our trailer park home so nights were spent sticking to an old leather couch in the living room hoping for a breeze to come in through the windows.  Meals consisted of canned goods warmed up over a battery operated camping burner and were eaten by candlelight.  To say the least, it wasn’t a pleasant time, especially when Charles would take out his frustration and failures on the rest of us, which was almost a nightly occurrence.

            In any case, I couldn’t help thinking back as I looked at his expectant, unhappy face and realized for the thousandth time how much I really did hate him for what he had done to our family. 

“What are you staring at? Are you stupid or something?  Hurry up, and hand me a wrench,” he ordered.

            I frantically searched through his tools having no idea what I was looking for and handed him my best guess.

He threw it back into my lap yelling, “I said a wrench, damn it!”

Startled, I meekly replied, “I’m sorry. I don’t know which one it is.”

            At that point, he turned to look at me and shoved the toolbox towards me causing more tools to fly into my arm and lap in the process.

“You little asshole! You just don’t want to help me. Fine! Go to your room, and I don’t want to see you again for the rest of the night!” he yelled at me.

            As tears of helpless frustration welled into my eyes and anger became a living thing inside me, I jumped up and ran to my room before he could see them.  I passed my mother in the hall who had heard the yelling.  As my door closed, I heard him instructing her not to try to sneak any dinner to me either.  I ran to my bed and sobbed into my pillow while beating it with my fists.  After my tears had run their course, I began to realize how hungry I was but was glad to go without food if it meant a peaceful evening away from him.  It was times like these that I really missed Mina the most.  She couldn’t take living with Charles anymore and had left to go live with our father a couple of years ago.  For some reason, I found it much more difficult to leave, because it felt like I would be abandoning Michael and mom, but I could never understand why my mother insisted on making this marriage work.  Sometimes I thought she just didn’t think much of herself and maybe she thought she should just give up since three tries at marriage had all already failed miserably.  She may consider this one a still functional relationship and family, but I knew better.  Emotionally drained, I fell quickly to sleep and got some much needed rest.

            The following evening, I was hiding in my room under the pretense of doing homework, when I heard a soft knock at my door.

“Come in,” I called, at which point my mother stuck her head in.

“Supper’s ready,” she said.

“Mom, can I ask you a question please?”

“Sure, honey, what is it?”

“I can see how unhappy you are, how unhappy we all are because of him.  Why do you stay with him? Do you really love him?” I asked.

“I love him in my own way, and he is Michael’s father.  I can’t take his son away from him, honey,” she said as she rose to leave.

“Just tell him you’re sorry for yesterday, honey, everything will be back to normal,” she said.

Normal? I thought.  In what universe could this ever be considered normal?

            So, as I followed her into the dining area, I prepared myself to face him again while swearing that I would not put up with his crap anymore. Then I wondered how many times I’d made that same promise to myself time and time again and always to no avail.

            While I helped Mama set the table, I carefully avoided looking at Charles since he was already seated at the dinner table and waiting to be served.  As usual, Mama made up his plate first and set it in front of him.  Naturally, he immediately noticed that the meat was a little overdone and demanded to know why Mama “couldn’t even cook dinner correctly.”  She softly tried to calm him and explain that it was an accident.  She had been cleaning and helping my little brother, Michael, with his homework when she was cooking dinner.  Apparently, this was not a satisfying excuse for him and he proceeded to throw food, plate and all towards the sink while yelling at her.

“Are you really that stupid?” he said.

            I watched the very familiar scene in front of me and saw the all too present tears well up in Mama’s eyes yet again. I looked over to my baby brother and saw the fear in his eyes, and I simply couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Stop it!” I screamed, “Stop yelling at her!”

            Everyone froze and looked up at me in surprise.  I realized that I was just as shocked as anyone that those words had actually come out of my mouth.  There was a split second of complete silence before Charles turned his anger on me.

“Who the hell do you think you are? This is my house, and I’ll say whatever I damn well please,” he said.

“You’re such a coward,” I replied. “You have to scream and curse at everyone in this house to make yourself feel like more of a man when it’s no one’s fault but your own that you can’t keep a job and support your family. I won’t just sit here and take it anymore.”

“Fine. Get your stuff and get the hell out of my house!” he roared.

“Gladly,” I replied.

            While I was packing a few things to get me through until I could come back for the rest when no one was home, I expected to feel upset; instead, I felt relief.  Of course, I couldn’t help but to also feel guilty about leaving Mama and Michael here.  I knew it would only become harder for them without the extra helping hand, but I simply could not stay any longer, and I would be damned if I was going to apologize to that man again.  No, I would never, ever have to apologize to him again.  At sixteen years old, I drove away only a few moments later in an old junker that was on its last legs, $40 in my pocket and no place to live.  I had never felt so free.

Fiction Piece Revision Account

            It took my a while to decide on a topic for this assignment, but I finally settled on a mix between fiction a reality.  My fiction piece is essentially based on something that actually did happen in my life several years ago; however, I changed the story up quite a bit as well as names and time periods to make it appropriate for this assignment.  Even so, this was still a little difficult for me to do, because I have never written fiction literature before.  To say the least, I was a little intimated by this assignment, but it came about better than I thought it would thanks in part to my peer editor, Christina.

            Christina reviewed my fiction piece for me and gave me some very helpful advice on changes that would improve the story.  Some of her remarks were on minor word choices and grammatical issues, which definitely needed some attention, and some of the more important changes she suggested are as follows:

1. In the climax, which is towards the end of my story, I mention Charles’s trouble with keeping a job, and Christina suggested that I should make a previous mention of this earlier in the story.  Therefore, I inserted the last paragraph on page two  to give the reader a little more history in that area.

2. Christina also mentioned that I should perhaps tell the reader a little more about how Charles’s emotional and verbal abuse is affecting specific members of the family, which is where the very second paragraph in the paper came from.  I go into a little of Michael’s trouble in school to give the reader some more insight into what the family is suffering on an individual level.

3. She also suggested that I give a little more reasoning behind the mother’s acceptance of her situation.  Specifically, Christina wanted to know why the mother in the story doesn’t stand up for herself more so I inserted a little preview into that at the top of page four.

            As you can see, I took Christina’s tips to heart and made some beneficial changes to my story.  Her advice was extremely helpful to me, especially since my story was not long enough for this assignment and I was having a lot of trouble finding places to insert more length to it.

            I also had my boyfriend review and edit my fiction piece for me as well.  However, he is a Machine Inspector for machine shop and pays great attention to the fine details so most of what he helped me with were grammatical things such as sentence structure, word usage, and punctuation.  This was also very helpful to me in completing my fiction piece.

            That being said, I still feel that there is much that can be done with this piece.  While I am currently at a stand still on ideas for this story, I would very much like to come back to it again later and develop it some more.