forest fire

[prologue]: she took heroin

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't feel any remorse for the lifeless woman that was slumped over next to me. 

I cried at first. I cried for hours but as each tear fell, I questioned if they were real– I questioned if whether or not I was sobbing uncontrollably because it seemed like the proper thing to do, or if I actually wished my mother were still alive right now.

When I first noticed that Mom stopped breathing, I couldn't even bring myself to look at her. My mother had always had small moments where the drugs would make her sleep so deeply that she seemed dead. I sat here for hours, watching television, assuming that she was still with me before it finally dawned on me that she was gone.

After about three hours, I took it upon myself to put my two fingers to her wrist, only to reveal no pulse. An odd feeling washed over me– a mix of sorrow and relief took over my body. It felt as if I had to force the tears to well up and fall from my eyes.

Eventually, the unruly weeping turned into quiet tears, and then the quiet tears turned into none at all. I slowly but surely realized that she didn't deserve my tears. Not after the lies and pain that she put me through.

Not after what she did to my father.

Something felt off when I walked into our small Los Angeles apartment that afternoon, there was an eerie vibe that flooded the entire house. The way she welcomed me home with such a shit-eating grin on her face, and when she hit me this morning when I gave her whole milk in her cereal instead of two percent, something in me felt like that would be the last swing she ever took at my body.

Every day when I came home from school, I watched as she wrapped her arm in that thick rubber rope and stuck a needle in her vein, it was always the same red-buttoned needle and old silver spoon. But when I watched her do it today with a new needle, something in me screamed to stop her.

But I didn't– if I would've stopped her, she would've hit me. She would've screamed at me in this very living room until her lungs couldn't scream anymore.

The only sound that filled the room was my sniffles, the low humming sound of the television, and the crackling of our raggedy air conditioning unit as it was trying to fight off this heatwave.

I shivered as I struggled to pull the thin blanket over my shoulders. The air-conditioning was so broken that tape covered the thermostat and there was no way for us to adjust the temperature. I was sure our apartment had to be below seventy degrees, my arm was practically covered in goosebumps, but it's better to be cold than feel the 104-degree weather from outside.

The cold air was probably why mother hadn't started to smell, yet.

"The Antler Bay Police Department and California Public Safety Department are asking for civilians' help in identifying a group of suspects who robbed a bank on Thursday afternoon," the television emitted, the picture on the screen cut to a picture of three tall men in different animal masks, wearing wetsuits.

Antler Bay. A small island around 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. It was where my parents were from, and where I was born before my mother and father ran away with me to Los Angeles. It was a beautiful and luxurious island that was filled with crime; there was never a day where you wouldn't hear about something odd happening there.

Loud, hard boots stomping their way through my front door and onto our hard floors interrupted the quiet hum of television. The paramedic glanced worriedly at me before sitting his first aid kit down onto the ground next to our tattered green couch.  Another paramedic followed him inside with a stretcher trudging behind him.

"What's she taken?" the first man asked, putting his hand on her wrist to check her no longer existing pulse.

"Heroin," I hoarsely clarified. The sound of my own voice shocked me a bit, I hadn't spoken in over six hours.