Red, White and Blue Makes Me

Red, white and blue makes me vomit. Its only purpose serves as a reminder of him and her. Not one of us endured as much as she while living below in the crappiest of flats. Their spats added to the agony of not having another room to retreat to when the usual Saturday night special was telecast. It wasn’t easy listening to the belt welt her naked back. Her lips, pressed right up against the wall, muffled the crying. The face slapping was always sudden, sparing us of grimacing while clasping our hands together to pray. The screams always ended in a sniveling whimper. Then, complete silence for almost an hour, before the bumping would start. He’d passionately grunt and say “I love you," and she’d respond back with sleazy affections that caused him to bang her head harder and faster against the wall. It would be over much quicker than their fights. Sunday sunrise would find Saturday night oblivious. Strong black coffee and the smell of pig frying seemed to cure the all-night woes. Our intentional glances did not stop the back and forth trips to the trash bin to dump the previous nights souvenirs. The sharp pieces of broken glass sticking out of the bag danced off the mirror in the hallway foyer as she passed my door. Not once was there ever an utterance of anything sounding like help-me-please. Perhaps the exposure of the marks on her once olive skin was a cry for help. Days to weeks to months to years, life just went on. It must be a hellish torment to live in a quiet storm that unwittingly captures day-to-day livelihood fueled by misery and no mercy. On the eve of their demise, some of us still talk about how love and pain took both of them. She waited that evening, not sure at first of her plan to help him stop hurting his self. He’d come back, as usual, after being told to get the hell out from police officers. He walked right up the stairs and was immediately blinded by blinking lights that fired off like a- stroke-of-midnight New Years Eve celebration. Big and bang! Quick and loud. The four-walled-apartment was dead. Instead of a judgment of death, she still breathes. A padded five by ten room is home, donned with pictures she paints of roses, some blooming and some dead. No one visits, except the woman who lives under 201B. She always takes lots of paper with her.

Little Did He Know

There he goes again, sneaking through the back door of the building, as if that pock-marked bald head of his is undetectable. The mirror in the hallway foyer catches a glint of a shiny forehead attached to an elongated neck passing my door. Huge arms flapped back and forth in unison with legs protruding from tattered-styled blue jeans. The wife-beater t-shirt was ripped, torn from the three-hour-ago altercation that resulted in him being kicked out of apartment 201B for the umpteenth time this month. The police, when called, told him the usual, “Don’t come back here,” one cop would yell while the other toyed with the ammunition on his belt buckle. He reached the top of the staircase. Moving with confident ease, he stops in front of 201B. The door, left slightly ajar this time, met him with a deafening silence he had not encountered before. In the past, whenever he left, upon his return he would find 201B as it was before, with no evidence of drunken brutality. The blood stains were removed from the walls and carpet, and broken objects that were salvagable got pieced back together and returned to the places they were thrown from. It was quiet. Someone was in there alright. Just as the door was pushed opened, small frail hands clasped a bulky hard object and 201B burst into a succession of blinking white lights. Little did he know, this time, 201B would not return to normalcy.