She don’t rightly know anyone but her siblings and her whose father eviscerated and whose mother evaporated. She’s read about them in the books that sit on her bookshelf under the silent section that screams brutality. Their stories are there; the sketch of their soul slaughter; the imprint their collective parental/predator pain.
It’s tough to be a kid with shadows for parents — the ones that shadow box — the shadows you never saw. You window shop for wisdom. You bargain buy acceptance. You get respectability on the cheap. Money is tight you know, so are meals — so you goes hungry a lot. It’s a hunger that sticks to the bones even after you have found some fat. It’s a leanness to your soul, long after the long is gone.
You grow up fast and hard in a fictional place of love that you create inside your busted brain. Broken down places need order, so you create them. Momma’s always do this… Daddy’s would never do that. So you make mud cakes out of your own misery and you eats them. Cause hungry ain’t no way to live.
Momma he’s crazy. Momma she had a baby. Just an orphan girl rocking babies on the rim of her own ruin. Blackened eyes; broken heart; fractured face. She is old too young.
She wrapped them up in the the blanket she made for her — she never meant for it to be misery too.
She’s grown and she’s shown just how much farther she’s got to go.
Naw… It ain’t easy being a momma with nothin but what wasn’t.
It just ain’t easy.