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bring on more bloodshed than necessary. Hands at my sides, like I was armed and ready for war duty, I refused to move a muscle, even if I was about to fall.

If I were a statue, instead of what I really was, maybe a pigeon would land on my shoulder instead of her hand, and the sweat down my back would really be from the pigeon, more relieving like a balm, but still in the same celebration of derogatory carelessness. Almost, my mind could convince my body it was made of stone and marble, or maybe brass or iron. Nearly, I may have been able to fall into a day dream in that pitch dim corner, and become invisible; just part of the scenery, and neutral to my fate. I wouldn't care if anyone bothered to clean the bird crap from my neck and waist, only that there was something there I could feel to make me feel like something alive.

A hand shot towards my chest, grabbing my lungs, keeping the air, if just for a moment, from my throat. My feet stayed still, my legs held steady, and I just stared into her eyes, the blue so dim she almost had no irises at all. No light shone there either, as I'd seen in pictures in the old yearbooks below the kitchen cabinets. Something in time had broken what was inside the shell left behind now; the faade that had hidden her impulses for so many years.

The hand moved again, for my hair this time, a stronghold; a leash, but this time, in a refusal to move, the hand lost its battle, as part of its handle came loose, sending her aback.

The pain was tolerable, normal. She screamed, the sound shrill and hoarse, making my ears ring, pushing me to hear her. I didn't. Long ago, I learned to ignore it so I wouldn't have the surviving urge to fight back. I'd lose. For some reason though, this time, a word flitted into my head, as I looked away from her face, and into the glossy blue of the lamp base. She used a different tirade, accusing me of another false wrong-doing, but in a new voice. I wasn't disordering the world anymore, or preventing the peace of society, or failing to be a normal child. At first I couldn't believe she was being honest, something of a novelty. She was blaming mefor her. She blamed me for the drug deals she made.

She blamed me for the morphine, the codeine, the weed, for the broken down car, and the shattered walls in the dingy, yellowed apartment we lived in. And the ghetto full of knives and impoverished in the purgatory of the Dallas metroplex; gated in by freeways and highways of road-kill and the bloody fists of drunken

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