There's a woman rocking
back and forth, beseeching me to find and protect her daughter, praying
hour after hour in the hope that I'll answer.
What can I say? Her daughter will be dead
in three years from a heroin overdose and the body declared a Jane Doe.
The woman herself will die before that: raped,
beaten, and shot by two young men with nothing better to do on a fine
spring afternoon.
The first young man is a victim of sexual
abuse. The second young man simply hates the world and himself in
that order. Neither man will pay for the crime but they certainly won't
escape life unscathed.
The girl ran away in search of a better future.
Her great-grandmother did the same thing and
found the New World was not the paradise she'd been promised. She
died at thirty while working in a sweat shop.
The girl will get pregnant in less than a month
after having unprotected sex for money.
The baby will be born prematurely but will
survive that and the death of his mother to become a ward of the state
and many of its medium security prisons before getting popped in a
drive-by.
He will have already fathered another child who
will be killed by her mother during a fit of rage when the toddler
spills a glass of milk.
The family line will end here, leaving in its
wake a trail of blood and tears, a tribute to the fruitful possibilities
of man.
Amen.
Copyright 2006 by
Stephen D. Rogers
Over three hundred of Stephen's
stories and poems have been selected to appear in more than a hundred
publications. His website, www.stephendrogers.com, includes a list
of new and upcoming titles as well as other timely information.
