Crosses Row on Row.

Music pumped from the basement vibrating my small bed, muting the sounds of strangers yelling through out the house. I would curl up in a ball and cover my ears with stuffed animals and rest my heavy eyes. The sounds of broken glass followed by screams started as the fights began. My body went rigid and I screamed into my pillows but no one heard, tears fell down my already swollen face. It was like this every night no matter what day Monday through Sunday. I was up until 4:30 but you never knew, you thought my room was somehow sound proof, like my thin blanket would protect me against the sounds of the disturbed land below but really it hardly protected me against the cold January nights because you forgot to put the heat on. I laid there in the black staring at my ceiling as the waves of sound spilled into my room; stars glowed green in the darkness.
When footsteps grew closer to my door I would scare myself into thinking it was that man you hid in my closet from the police that one night, but I knew he was in jail. He was in jail for putting someone in a coma for two weeks; which I thought was strange since he never went to jail for shooting at you with a shot gun. I guess you were too scared to tell anyone but me. Sometimes I’m glad you told me, sometimes I’m not, it means that there was someone to talk to you about it after, even if I was only 10 but it also means that I would be haunted by my own imagination as I picture the bullets fly passed your frightened face as they punctured the things around you nearly taking your life.
Sometimes I would sit on dusty hay bails in our old barn and stare at the bullet holes as they let in little stipples of light and imagine what it would be like if one had hit you. You would be cold as the concrete floor you stood upon and these would be the memories that I would be left with and I would know that when footsteps walked towards my door it wouldn’t be you coming to sing me to sleep. I would be an orphan; a child of the state but you could say that I’ve always been.
If you had died all those familiar strangers would leave and I would be alone in my abandoned house just the way you left it rotting milk, broken chairs and fine powders on little glass mirrors, stale beer would linger in the air like it always has. It would be like when you left for days on end but this would be forever. It would feel strange to hear the music stop and just the cold dead buzz of the speakers drill into my mind.
But you hadn’t died, those bullets whizzed right passed you and your only thought was that you had great luck because that was one more night to live it up. Some of these nights you would bring me with you when you couldn’t get a baby sitter. You would gently lay me down in a bed in one of the empty bedrooms in one of the strangers houses and you would tell me to go to sleep and not to worry then you would leave me in the still dark room. I would wait for the music to gradually creep under the door just like the thick twirling smoke that slowly asphyxiated me in the night.
I never slept; I laid there staring at the windows covered in tinfoil and watched dream catchers catch other people’s dreams because I wasn’t sleeping. I never slept, I couldn’t have slept I was scared to sleep because I knew that I would have peed the bed again and I was scared of you. You had the voice of a dictator loud and like an explosive it would destruct in my ears; you took many casualties many of them being my happy memories. You weren’t very forgiving and didn’t often care that I had a medical problem and I didn’t know how to fix it so I laid there in smelly, stained sheets tingling in exhaustion until 8am, when the filth had finally gone to bed.
Every time I opened the bedroom door I small sliver of light illuminated the room temporarily blinding me, sometimes I wished it had blinded me for I wouldn’t have to see what laid outside the door. People upon people unconsciously sprawled around the house groaning. Broken glass laid in shards on the floor beside puddles of puke that stung my nose. It felt like I was the last survivor in a war on these mornings, like my fellow soldiers had been brutally slaughtered in the night and I couldn’t even tell their families what had happened because couldn’t face them and tell them that I did nothing but count sheep while the battle raged on. I couldn’t stop the vicious war of drugs and I knew that more soldiers would be recruited the next day to play out the war like it had for the past two years.
One day the war will shoot you like the man in the closet but the bullets wont miss they will pierce your young skin. I will hammer in your white cross like all the other soldiers that had died in the war of drugs, and like all the other orphans that pray by the crosses row on row the war in my heart will end.