By Tracy Chiles McGhee
She struck me like she just found out I stole her entire life and even worse as if it had been a great one. And then she casually walked away instructing me to clean up the mess she blamed me for making. Stretched out on the hardwood floor next to a broken vase with fake flowers tossed all around, I heard four things loud and clear — the clankity clank of her cheap heels as she went upstairs to begin her after work routine that began with freeing herself from her bra and body shapers, my little brother Jojo laughing like he was watching a scene in a cartoon and I was the bad guy whose head just got blown off with a canon ball, the piercing silence of my father, who, as usual, was nowhere to be found, and a commanding voice in my throbbing head that was urging me to get up off the floor, run away from everything that was making my life miserable and to never look back. There had to be a better place somewhere else out there so I listened to the voice, which was now louder than the other three sounds.
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Margery Hannah 
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