Young Writers Society

Booker sat in the Village Garden parking lot, listening to the engine tick like raindrops on a tin roof. Staring forward – staring at nothing, staring at everything – he kept his hands on the steering wheel and returned to the hospital room; re-imagining the walls painted crimson by broken screams and how the air was iron with blood and the brutality in the doctor's voice. He visualized the baby in Eva's arms and her smile as she held it in her arms for the first time. She had been so small. Everything about her was miniature. Toes the size of ball bearings and eyes – wrinkled sockets ground into her forehead – that fluttered like the wings of some dying sparrows. And the life. The freshness, the newness of creation.

There was a kind of reverence in that hospital room, he decided.

A kind of purity.

Nothing that could be reproduced by stain-glass saints or whispered prayers or sermons with words inside of them like Hallelujah and Lord and Risen. There was no kind of baptism like placental fluids and residual blood.

And there he was. Beaten, bruised, worn, and spent. Corrupted by asphalt and crooked sidewalks suffering from scoliosis. His quintessence painted black by guns and dusted with a thin layer of crack cocaine. He felt incredibly inadequate holding the baby there as Eva went into the third and final stage of her pregnancy. She burned in his hands. Her innocence ate through his skin.

There had been a halo of wisdom around her.

And he had asked himself.

I'm supposed to raise her?

The embodiment of urban decay, a gutted carnal shell, was supposed to cultivate this pocket of life and light?

He couldn't. He just couldn't. The ghosts of his past – the ghosts of his present – hung above his head like a leaden nimbus of clouds. It went wherever he went. It touched whatever he touched. There it was. Constantly eroding. Constantly breaking down.

Whispering words that spoke of dark alleys and clandestine laughing and blood spattered hands.

Entropy at it's finest.

For God's sake, he couldn't raise her! He couldn't be a father figure. His greatest fear now, his greatest terror, was reflecting his own upbringing on her. Jin Lee all over again. Smoke stumbling from crooked grins, hushed conversations,and money slapped into open palms like cards snapped onto a poker table.

Sex, drugs, and rock-sized bits of heroin.

That was his childhood.

That defined him.

And everyday of his life, every minute in the presence of his newborn girl would be like holding her in that hospital room. Feelings of inadequacy would destroy him.

He sighed and opened the door of the Mercedes, feeling his sins and his actions and a concerto of imagined gunshots following him out, slumped beside them with hands in pockets. Booker locked the car and headed up the flight of outdoor stairs, suddenly reminded of the night before. Coming home. Coming home with another notch on his gun casing and the smell of gunpowder lacing his nostrils.

He lifted his shoulder gently and gritted his teeth as he pumped it gently back and forth.

Mao's parting gift.

From Chinatown, with love.

Booker stopped at the top step and leaned against the railing, feeling the weight of the day come crashing down on his shoulders, pushing them forward. Exhaustion was punching him in the gut and igniting the muscles in his calves as if they were coiled fuses. His throat was raw. His mind was raw. His eyes felt like someone had sprinkled sawdust into them.

And, for God's sake, he was a father now!

Booker hunched forward, tapped a cigarette out of a pack of Marlboro's, and lit up. Smoke pooled in his lungs like water and dribbled from his mouth carelessly, obscuring the city skyline. He closed his eyes and tried to think of something other than the tiny body writhing in that nursery bassinet without a name yet. Something other than the future and the past and how Eva's eyes had combusted with such ecstasy at the sight of their newborn daughter.

Sure, the kid was his.

But she was just another problem. An obstacle – new and improved.

Booker took another drag and kept walking, fumbling in his pocket for his keys. He couldn't wait until they could afford to upgrade neighborhoods. He couldn't wait until he could shake off this suburban, tenement dust clinging to his shoes like oil stains. He was sick and tired of living behind paper tissue walls and the motel-esque climate of this God-awful apartment block. Ubiquitous sirens, police officers busting sweaty neighbors every other week for dealing drugs, smoke and alcohol practically saturating the ceiling. As soon as he got the money, they were gone.

Burning rubber out of the parking lot.

The cigarette in his mouth drooped as he kicked open his door and flipped on his lights, stepping inside.

He heard the clock ticking and something shift behind the door.

Immediately, Booker felt someone with a vice grip crush his wrist, jerk it behind his back, and shove him against the wall. He gasped, his visions rupturing into a storm of glass shards and the oxygen in his lungs – the smoke in his lungs was stolen away by intangible hands. The world was suddenly painted a deep crimson as he was shoved forward again; the wall inches from his nose and weeping a throbbing hysteria. His heart felt like it had ruptured behind it's cage and the cigarette stumbled to the ground.

Another pair of hands.

Searching him. Patting him down.

And then a handcuff ring snapped around his wrist – a sound that shattered the air with defeaning finality, “You have the right to remain silent,” a voice hissed by his ear, hot with quiet triumph. “Anything you say can and will be used against in you in a court of law.”

Booker's vision spiderwebbed with forced tears, little threads fracturing the wall in front of him.

The police!

He felt the second ring descending around his wrist. They shoved him again and oxygen fled from his throat.

No.

Not this time.

This time he had Eva and the baby to think about.