Here It Comes

i finally finished my final short story of the semester and i have decided to grace you all with an excerpt. now, this is by no means my 'final, awesome, ready to be published today' version. just a tab of literature for you to read, get excited about, and perhaps never see the rest of the story because i get lazy and forget to post it on here. so if you like and wish to see the rest just message or email or text or call or carrier pidgeon me and i shall send it your way. aight, BREAK.

PART I

The scar had been on my wrist for as long as I could remember. Granted, that wasn’t very long. I’d only been living with Mama and Daddy for about five years and any memories before that came from stories Mama told me about the children’s home. She told me about how I’d come to her knowing how to tie my shoes and even how to crack an egg but she never mentioned the moon-shaped blemish I’d always wondered about.

When I finally asked her, that day in the kitchen, her arms elbow deep in a bag of flour, her lips scrunched up the same way they did when she bit into the sour candies Daddy left out in the crystal bowl on the coffee table. My best friend, Billy Morris, had told me how he’d gotten the huge scar on his knee from falling off his bike when he was four and then asked about scar. He was rather disappointed when I’d said I didn’t know. “Don’t you know girls like scars?”

She turned away from me real fast, trying to hide her face but I caught the expression anyway. She rambled off something about how I put my arm through a window at one of the homes. She forgot to use her lying voice, the one that sounded strong and flowed and I never doubted. This voice tumbled fast out of her mouth, words falling over one another and blending together. I’d heard it before when she struggled to find an excuse to get out of bridge club when Mrs. Manning called. I wondered why she was keeping it a secret? If it was secret it must be a cool story and I needed a cool story to tell the girls.

I asked her again after dinner as she did the dishes, and again the next morning as she put her makeup on in her bathroom mirror. Finally, after about three more failed attempts over lunch, laundry, and Jeopardy she finally cracked when I snuck in her room in the middle of the night faking a nightmare. Daddy always told me twelve was too old to be sleeping in my parent’s bed but if I begged Mama long enough she usually let me crawl into that warm, safe space between her arms. As I stuck my nose in the hollow between her neck and her collarbone, I mumbled into her skin the same question I’d plagued her with the past two days. Instead of jumping at an answer this time, I felt her chest rise slowly as a deep sigh rattled her bones, vibrating against my back. She silently urged me out of bed and led me to the porch where she folded up my tiny frame in her lap. The stars were out and a faint chill nipped at my bare legs. I always loved how I was still small enough to sit in her lap. The kids at school were going to make fun if they ever found out, but I loved the way her arms felt soft against mine and how her shirt smelled like peaches when I buried my face in her shoulder and how easily my legs wrapped around her waist.

            “You didn’t grow up in foster homes,” she started. Her voice didn’t waiver and her blue eyes didn’t move from my brown ones. “You lived with your real Mom and Dad before you came to us.”

            At first I thought she was making this up. She was telling me a story, she used to do that sometimes when I couldn’t get back to sleep. She went on to tell me that my real mom had gotten sick and had taken me to a Children’s Home where I’d lived for a couple days before her and Daddy had come to get me. My mind struggled to wrap around the idea that Mama had been telling me stories this whole time. She’d always said my parents had died when I was a baby and then I was bounced around to foster homes. She’d told me I had so many memories that my brain had gotten overwhelmed and forgotten them all. Question after question skipped through my brain but I only settled on one.

            “So are my parents still alive?” I asked weakly, hesitant to hear the answer.

            “I don’t know,” she answered. “Your Mama was real sick. She didn’t even tell your Daddy she was taking you away.”

            I didn’t know what to think first. What did they look like? What was wrong with my Mom? Did my Dad still wonder about me the way I found myself wondering about him late at night in the empty darkness of my room after Mama and Daddy had gone to sleep? I was so distracted that the one question I didn’t think to ask was why Mama had never told me where the scar had come from.