I shuffled to reach my radio, my freezing hands ramming in the on button. It was Bob Dylan singing ‘Everything is Broken’…
“Broken voices on broken phones,
Take a deep breath, feel like your chokin’
Everything is broken…”
Then, a soothing harmonic love song came on, a high pitched women with a serene voice was singing her heart out. I took another forbidding yawn, whilst my thin lined spectacles frosted up. I removed them from my head and blew my icy poignant breath clearing the lens. Subsequent to perching them back on my head, the engine started to choke, and my car gradually came to a stop. I cursed to myself praying that it hadn’t broken down for sure. Prior to my car stopping the women’s voice was a pleasing comforting tone, now it had turned into a dark shrill scream.
I reached to the handle and shifted out the car, my joints squeaking like an old geriatric patient climbing out of a hospital bed for the first time. A smell of leaked oil filled the atmosphere. I ambled to the front of the car and hoisted up the hefty metal bonnet. A torrent of white steam condensing, warmly greeted me. My engine had burst. Now it was absolutely inevitable that I was ever going to get this piece of junk to start again.
I was stranded, but my main problem was that I lacked a cell phone. But I had nobody to call for help anyway. I hobbled to the rear of the car and opened the boot, the ford emblem glistening in the radiant moonlight. I scrambled for a flashlight and for my repair kit, but to my despair the repair kit was sparse.
“Jesus Christ”, I exclaimed to myself. I grabbed for my packet of cigarettes and took out my lighter out of my back pocket of my shabby jeans. My only option was to walk to a nearest town or house to find help.
I switched on the flashlight and held the cigarette in my pursed lips. I took a long puff, revitalising my senses like a man having been just brought back to life by resuscitation. As I walked flashlight in hand, a harsh arctic gust of wind past triggering shudders all over my body like when a city is brought to darkness by a power cut in a few seconds. To the other side of the hedges were desolate bogs overgrown with spindly reeds and bone thin deprived trees covered in a thick frost.
As I continued walking I gathered an uneasy presence, as if someone or something was following me. Everything was quiet, it was an eerie feeling. The howling winds had ceased and the only noise that penetrated my ear drums was the frantic beating of a racing heart.
“Going somewhere Blackie?” a voice a few yards behind me lazily croaked.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I took a deep breath, and shakily turned around to meet my fate. It was my Dad, or in my head, ‘Psycho Derek’. His evil smile displayed his crooked yellow teeth which looked like they’d never been brushed in the last 55 years.
I shuddered, slightly. But then, a seemingly sudden rush of adrenaline caused me to say , “ Yeah, I am just a black girl. You can call me African American or black or whatever makes you feel less like a pervert. My skin color is brown - so what. I am fully aware of my heritage and the history of my race in the U.S. (the slavery and civil rights). And as a matter of fact, it makes me proud of who I am, and the cultured land that I come from. My skin color is part of me but it doesn't define me. In my own mind, I am a regular girl who missed the wonderful childhood she deserved. ”
That did it, I think. All my life, I longed for him to love me, and maybe be happy to see me smile. But I seemed to have failed miserably. I felt like an ant clinging onto the windshield of her adoptive father’s life in a hope for even the smallest amount of affection. But the wipers had finally been successful in flicking me off.
There was beauty in every stride of his. I think I found myself almost smiling at his sinister pride. That one shot seemed to give a strange liberating feeling. The next thing I remember was being soar, barely able to walk, burred vision, then an excruciating pain somewhere in the back of my head.
Then everything went black.
