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Story One - The Yellow House

“It’s been too-oo hard living! But I’m afra-aid to di-i-ie, cause I don’t know what’s up the-re-re-re, beyo-ond the sky-y.” Jerrica’s coarse but soulful singing carried the lyrics to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” over the harsh winds of early March. The white flowers on the dogwood that stood in her front yard shivered in the thirty-six-degree weather, but not Jerrica. She didn’t mind the cold when she felt like she did. All she needed was her bag of sunflower seeds and a cell phone, literally. She was butt ass naked. Her clothes, an oversized gray t-shirt with bleach stains and a green pair of jeans, made a pile in the dirt with her black thong as the cherry. While holding the phone’s speaker to her ear with one hand, and dumping sunflower seeds in her mouth between melodies with the other, she howled to the heavens with her knees in the dirt.

The sun always illuminated her one-story, two-bedroom home right before sunset. Its pale-yellow shingles glowed bright, allowing it to blossom among the brick houses that neighbored each side. The door, battered and abused, splintered through its dark-brown coat of paint. Security bars covered each of the five windows. There was a purple 1992 Ford Taurus L sitting in the driveway, where the concrete was cracked. The property was a perfect square, outlined by a chain-linked fence. Honeysuckles overtook the left side, spreading their sweet smell across the yard.

Suddenly, the front door flung open and Darnell stood in its place. “Jerrica!” he hollered over the roar of the wind.

“Then I go-o-o to my-y-y brother, and I say brother, help me plea-ea-ease.” She was focused on the music; she didn’t notice Darnell stampeding toward her.

“The hell you doing!?” He clutched Jerrica’s tiny arm so tight that it felt like her bone was ready to snap. He snatched the phone out of her hand and yanked her up, until her eyes were level with his chest.

“Dammit, Darnell! You’re hurting me!” She cried.

“Why the fuck you out here naked!?”

She let out a delusional laugh as she squirmed her way out of his grasp. “This breeze is everything!” She pranced around happily while her matted black hair shifted stiffly in the wind.

Darnell shuttered as the wind cut through his basketball shorts and white Hanes tank-top. In that second, he thought about how fucked up it was that he was doomed to playing care taker to a thirty-two-year-old drug fiend. He was only twenty-one, so he really didn’t even know shit about taking care of himself. But, in that very next second, he remembered how fucked up his life actually was, and it suddenly didn’t seem all that unbelievable. “Bring your junkie ass in the house, J-Jerrica,” he commanded with his teeth chattering.

She didn’t. Instead she stopped, dropped her bag of sunflower seeds, and inhaled deeply through her nose. “You smell that?”

“Jerrica!”

She looked over at Darnell and a grin flashed across her face, exposing her crooked smile. “Honeysuckles!” She galloped over to the bush and picked a few of the small yellow flowers. “We gotta get the honey out of ‘em, like when I was little!” Bringing them to her nose, she inhaled deeply again, then stuffed them all in her mouth. She coughed as she spat them out.

Darnell noticed that a few of the neighbors were outside, all of them holding their phones, recording.

“Woorrldstarr!” A sixteen-year-old boy, wielding an iPhone, antagonized them from across the street.

Darnell sucked his teeth. “I can’t stand this muhfucka,” he muttered to himself. “Aye, lil nigga! Tell yo’ freak ass momma Darnell said come through so I can get that sloppy ass top again!” he yelled back with a flick of his middle finger.

“Yeah, aight. Tell yo’ crackhead ass sister to stop fucking niggas in high school for they lunch money and I got you, big homie!” the sixteen-year-old responded with satirical sincerity.

Darnell clenched his fists, his face grew hot.

“Had that bitch like, ‘Oohh, DeMonte, you fuck me like a grown ass man!’” DeMonte, the sixteen-year-old, mimicked Jerrica’s voice almost perfectly. “She was about to throw the neck but her trifling ass had sunflower seed shells all in her teeth!”

In her own little world, Jerrica tried to stuff honeysuckles into Darnell’s mouth.

Darnell grabbed Jerrica and threw her to the ground. He stared down at her with his jaw clenched, breathing heavily through his nose, nostrils flared.

“Stop it, Darnell!” she pleaded.

DeMonte’s obnoxious laugh could be heard from across the street. “Go easy on her, Little Brother!”

Without a word, Darnell grabbed her by the arm, even tighter than before, and dragged her into the house.

The living room was junky. Envelopes with red stamps covered the coffee table, unopened. A surgical needle, a spoon, and a piece of plastic, ripped from a Ziploc bag, laid among them. An off-white residue was smeared into the wood. The air was thick with the smell of burnt grease. Smoke fumed from the pan on the stove.

Darnell shoved Jerrica to the side and bolted into the tiny kitchen.

Jerrica stumbled and fell to the floor.

“Look at this bull-shit!” Darnell grabbed the pan. With the grease still popping, he stood over Jerrica and waved the charred pork chop in her face. “Look what you made me do! The fuck we gonna eat tonight!?”

She was sitting on the creaky hardwood floor with her back leaning against the door, still naked. She was completely out of it, covered in dirt, staring off into an imaginary reality.

Darnell stepped back, looked at her, and his expression softened. He dumped the charred chop in the trash, put the pan in the sink, and helped his sister to her feet.

***

The next morning, Jerrica woke up to the smell of a Black & Mild, wine flavored, with the wood tip. The hum of voices vibrated through the thin walls. When she opened her eyes, a figurine of White Jesus was hanging on the wall beside the bed, smiling down on her.

“Thank you for waking me up this morning, Lord,” she prayed as she climbed from under the covers. Darnell had dressed her in gray sweatpants and a black “Virginia DARE” t-shirt before he helped her into bed the night before. She squinted as she pulled open her thick curtains, sunlight flooded in through the window. The breeze was calm and the birds were chirping. Three red cardinals fluttered back and forth on the branches of the dogwood that stood in her front yard.

Her room was disgusting. Sunflower seed shells were spat all over the floor. There were dirty plates piled on the dresser, a fork and a steak knife laid on top of them. Her dirty clothes were everywhere, besides inside the laundry basket that was full of random shit, tucked in the corner. There was a weird odor lingering in the air.

The only thing that was in order was her bookshelf. It was a children’s bookshelf that was as old as she was. It had been painted pink, her favorite color, but the brown wood showed where the paint had chipped away. All the books were lined up in perfect alphabetical order, besides the Bible that sat alone on the top shelf. She had books about addiction, several on self-help, a couple that examined religion, and about a dozen that explored love. She’d read every single one of them, more than once.

She grabbed her Bible and opened it to expose its hollowed-out pages. Inside was a small bag of heroin and a pink lighter. She rolled her eyes when she realized that her spoon and needle were on the coffee table. Pulling out a wedgie, from the front, she stumbled into the living room.

With an exhale of rolling white clouds of tobacco, Darnell passed the Black back to the guy who was sitting on the couch across from him. Next to him was an Asian guy, Japanese, who scrolled through Twitter while he sank down into the sofa.

“Who the hell is this you got in my house at eight in the damn morning?” Jerrica interrogated, looking crazy in the face.

“Don’t come out here bugging n’shit, Jerrica.” Darnell waved his hand, shooing her.

“Nigga, and what if I do?! This my house now, Dar-nell,” she snapped back.

Darnell sucked his teeth and pointed to the Asian kid, who still didn’t look up from his phone. “This is Ethan, I work with him at that pizza place over on CVU’s campus.” Coastal Virginia University was just a few blocks away. The yellow house was located right where the neighborhood full of college kids collided with the hood. Darnell looked over at the other guy and hesitated slightly before he spoke, “and this is Julius.” Both Ethan and Julius were around Darnell’s age.

With a condescending smile, Julius nodded his head before he exhaled his last hit. “Hey, how you doing?” he asked, nonchalantly.

Ethan kept scrolling.

“Hello, Julius.” Jerrica’s tone matched Julius’s smile. “Why y’all two lil niggas in my house, at eight in the damn morning?”

“Ma’am, we’re-” Julius started.

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, lil boy. I’m Jerrica.”

“Oh okay, sorry Jerrica.” Julius corrected himself, with a hint of sarcasm.

Ethan snickered, but still didn’t look away from his phone.

Then there was a silence.

“Don’t get quiet now! Y’all was being all talkative n’shit when I was in there tryna sleep.” Jerrica reminded, standing there with her arms folded.

“Aye, we was talking business. Some shit about to change around here.” Darnell stated, annoyed.

Julius immediately shot him a look that said, shut the fuck up.

“Yeah, what ‘business’ y’all talking? You deliver pizza, Darnell. You deliver pizza in that raggedy ass purple car,” Jerrica mocked. As she spoke, she noticed that there was a bookbag at Julius’s feet. She thought she put two and two together. “Y’all sell drugs?” She pointed to the bookbag then turned her full attention to Darnell, “Oh, so you gonna go off and be a drug dealer?” she accused. Her concern for her brother over powered the urge to find out what kind of drugs were in the bookbag, but it was definitely an uphill battle.

Darnell hesitated to speak and glanced over at Julius.

“Me and Ethan both go to CVU,” Julius stated confidently. “We’re tryna promote change by bridging a gap between the local and college communities after the recent shootings.” He reached in the bookbag, pulled out a binder, and handed it to Jerrica.

She opened it and saw things like “Community Outreach” and “Volunteer Work” which made her lose interest, immediately, so she passed the binder back to Julius.

“I’d have you come out to an event but junkies usually scare the kids.” Julius remarked unapologetically as he tucked the binder back into the bookbag.

Jerrica’s heart skipped a beat. She became flustered as she thought about how far away kids would always stay from her, it’s the one thing that bothered her the most during her addiction. “Oh nah, your lil friends gotta go,” she choked out.

“Aye bruh, you can’t be disrespecting my sister.” Darnell spoke up, timidly.

Holding the Black between his fingers, Julius lifted his open palms and bowed his head as he exhaled smoke. “It’s all love, fam. Ain’t no disrespect,” he apologized. He took another hit, stared Jerrica in the eyes, and blew a billowing cloud of nicotine in her direction.

Jerrica had been eyeballing the Black the whole time.

“Wanna tap this?” Julius asked, offering it to her with an insincere innocence.

She almost tried not to, but she grabbed it anyway. The room was quiet, besides the popping of burning tobacco in the tiny flame that fueled the end of the Black. With her eyes closed, she sucked in the smoke like it was the first fresh breath she’d taken in a long time.

Julius watched her with a menacing grin.

Darnell watched her with an awkward shame.

“Woorrldstarr!” DeMonte’s voice could be heard coming from Ethan’s phone, breaking the silence. He squinted as he brought the phone closer to his face. “Oh no-o-o,” he sat upright and laughed as his eyes lit up with amusement. “Julius, look at this shit bro.” He handed Julius the phone.

“Yeah, aight. Tell your crackhead ass sister to stop fucking niggas in high scho-”

“Aight, c’mon fam. Turn that shit off.” Darnell spoke up again. He was starting to get angry but tried his best not to show it.

Julius passed the phone back to Ethan, holding back what he wanted to say with a muffled chuckle. He covered his mouth with his hand and turned his face into the couch, his shoulders bounced while he laughed, silently.

“Five-thousand retweets since last night?” Ethan finally looked up, stupefied. His eyes were low and red, he’d been high as fuck the whole time. “Wow, you’re famous! Congratulations!” Ethan exclaimed to Jerrica.

Jerrica tried her best to appear unbothered, but tears had begun to run down her cheeks. She wiped them away as she went into her room, slamming the door behind her, with the Black still in hand. The thin walls trembled from the impact.

“Y’all should probably bounce,” Darnell suggested, staring at the door to Jerrica’s room uneasily.

Julius reached back into the bookbag, pulled out a brown paper bag that was stuffed with a pound of tree, and tossed it over to Darnell. “Flip that,” Julius commanded, “I’ll be back in like a week or two. Have the money ready and we can talk about putting you on for real.” He fumbled around in the bookbag as he spoke.

“A week or two?” Darnell asked.

Julius shrugged, “Yeah, whenever I get a chance.” He leaned forward and looked up at Darnell, a fake sense of concern in his eyes. “But look, my nigga. Whenever I come you gotta have my money ready. I really don’t like wasting my fucking time. You feel me?”

Darnell was slightly shook, “Yeah, I feel you. I got you, bro.”

Julius relaxed again, sitting back on the couch. “And it’s not a good idea to let your junkie-ass relatives know you push. That’s how all my shit is gonna end up disappearing,” he explained as he zipped up the bookbag.

“Yeah, or they end up ‘Ice’ing’ your ass,” Ethan added. “You don’t have a little brother, do you?”

Julius laughed, “Face ass! You watched Paid in Full one time and-”

Then there was a loud boom, Jerrica had burst out of her room. Tears covered her cheeks and snot was smeared on her top lip. She was holding a steak knife, pointing it at Julius and Ethan. She was taking slow, controlled, deep breaths. “Y’all are not gonna sit in my house and disrespect me,” she said with a calmed anger.

Both Julius and Ethan stood to their feet, slowly.

Julius slid the bookbag onto his back, “Aight, we’re lea-”

“GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT!” Jerrica finally snapped, rushing towards them.

Darnell hopped up and grabbed her.

Julius and Ethan scurried their way out the front door.

“Jerrica, they’re gone! It’s okay.” Darnell spoke reassuringly to his sister.

Sobbing, she let go of the knife, almost dropping it on Darnell’s bare foot before he yanked it out the way. Her sadness crippled her and she collapsed into Darnell’s arms.

“It’s okay.” Darnell rubbed her back as he held her.

Jerrica wept.

***

Later that day, right before sunset, Jerrica sat in a rusty metal chair that she dragged from the kitchen table out into the shade of the dogwood. It was a cool seventy-one degrees, and somebody down the street was washing a car in their driveway. “Killing Me Softly,” by The Fugees, blared from the radio. Jerrica was smoking the Black that she’d finessed from Julius. Behind her she heard the front door creak open.

“Bye Darnell, baby.” A woman with a sweet and seductive voice spoke behind Jerrica.

Jerrica, in deep thought, didn’t even bother to turn and see who it was.

“Aight now, Porsha. You know where to find me,” Darnell said as he tapped her on the ass, which poked prominently through her jeans before she walked through the gate and back across the street.

“Don’t forget to give DeMonte that money!” Darnell yelled to remind her as he sat on the ground next to his sister.

“I won’t!” Porsha hollered back, glancing over her shoulder with a smirk.

“Why you giving out money like we not about to get evicted?” Jerrica asked without looking at him.

“I wanted to show that lil nigga that you don’t need his lunch money,” Darnell said before a smug smile crept across his face, “and he’s gonna be mad as fuck when he realize where his momma been for the past two hours.”

Jerrica took another hit and exhaled. “You needa leave that alone, Darnell.”

“Leave what alone?” He asked.

“That whole situation. You argue back and forth with that boy like y’all the same damn age. And she a grown ass woman humping a twenty-one-year-old. Something ain’t right with that shit.” She explained.

Darnell looked at her like, you got some fucking nerve. “I know the hell you not talking, Jerrica.” Darnell dismissed her as he reached out his hand.

Without a word, she passed him the Black and they sat in silence as he took the last couple of hits before tossing the wood tip out into the street.

“That Julius ain’t no good.” Jerrica said as she continued to stare off.

“Don’t worry about me.” Darnell argued.

She finally looked over at him. “Trust me, those little college kids don’t know what the fuck they doing. They gonna get you hemmed up out here,” she elaborated.

Darnell noticed the glow of the house, it was sunset. “Aye, whassup with you? I ain’t seen you sober at sunset since I’ve been back.”

“I quit.”

“You quit?” Darnell got excited, then remembered that he knew better. “Shut your lying ass up.”

Jerrica looked down at the ground and shifted through the dirt with her foot, “I wanted to be a teacher. You ain’t know that, did you?”

“Hell nah.” Darnell was caught off guard. “For real?”

“Yupp, wanted to teach elementary school kids, just like mommy.” She let out a sigh of self-pity, “After yesterday that shit’s never gonna happen.”

“I’m sure that ship sailed way before yesterday.” Darnell added insensitively.

Rage started to swell in Jerrica’s throat but she held it back with a scoff. “You’ll never understand why I ended up like this. You don’t know the kind of person I used to be…” she trailed off.

Darnell sucked his teeth. “See, you always say that shit, but you forget we grew up in the same damn house. Shit, Pops used to do me worse than he did you for real, for real. He used to whoop my ass. He’d just yell at you and you’d start crying cause your ‘feelings were hurt.’ Soft ass.” He’d had enough of his sister constantly playing the victim. “That man was an abusive alcoholic and there ain’t shit either of us could have done to change it.”

Jerrica was quiet for a moment before she spoke, holding back what she really wanted to say. “Mommy was so beautiful,” she reminisced instead.

Instantly, a sadness swept over Darnell’s face. He didn’t speak.

“She had a beautiful garden too,” said Jerrica, “right on the left side of the house where the honeysuckles are. I always loved going out there with her and helping pull the weeds.” Jerrica looked down at her hands. They were scrawny, ashy, and calloused, but she saw them as small and untouched as they were when she was only eleven. “The way the dirt would run between my fingers was therapeutic.”

“I really wish I could have met her.” Darnell mustered up his words through the cries that had been lodged in his chest long before that moment.

Jerrica cut him a look, but still she held her tongue from speaking what was on her mind. “One day we was out there and I was helping mommy pick the sunflower seeds, the same way we did every year. She always glazed them perfectly in honey before she put them in the oven.”

Darnell glanced over at the half-empty bag of sunflower seeds that still lay in the yard from yesterday.

“Then daddy came home from work,” she continued, “he walked over to the garden and gave mommy that same passionate kiss that I’d seen him give her over and over for eleven years, every single day. I never had to question what true love looked like. What happiness felt like.”

Darnell had never heard about this side of his father, the cries in his chest grew louder.

“Then we went inside,” Jerrica smirked, “and I remember begging for a piece of candy, so daddy reached on top of the refrigerator and grabbed the candy jar. He let me have a whole big handful,” the smirk slid from her lips and was replaced by a solemn scowl. “They had to keep it up there because, ‘once you get started with that candy your lil butt don’t know how to stop.’”

Darnell assumed she was mimicking their parents.

“So, while I’m sitting there, stuffing my face with Fun Dip and Pop Rocks, they stood over me, but I ain’t pay them no mind. All the sudden I heard mommy say, ‘It’s a boy.’”

The cries in Darnell’s chest screamed so loud that they pushed their way up to his throat. “Stop it,” he hissed.

Jerrica looked over at him, with a look as cold as ice. “You took both of my parents away from me, Darnell. Everything is your fault.” Jerrica felt a giant weight lift off her shoulders.

Darnell stood to his feet and raised his hand as if he were about to smack the dog shit out of her, but he stopped himself. Tears collected in the corners of his eyes.

“Go ahead and hit me. HIT ME!” Jerrica stood up, leaning in with her cheek, tempting him. “You a pussy, Darnell! Always so quick to beat on your drugged-out sister but let these niggas in the street run all over you! And you wanna sell drugs?” She laughed in his face.

Darnell clenched his fists and ran into the house, Jerrica was right behind him.

“Leave me the fuck alone, Jerrica!” he yelled.

“Oh nah, hell nah! I’ve been waiting twenty-one years to let this shit out!” She yelled back, flailing her arms. She walked up on Darnell and stared up into his eyes. “You said you dropped out of school to help me after daddy died. That was two years ago, now look at this fucking place. Look at me!” She stepped back with her arms outstretched. “The pain never stops around this gahdamn yellow house!”

“You think I killed her on purpose, Jerrica!? It’s not my fault I got stuck! It’s not my fault she couldn’t push anymore!” Darnell defended himself through his tears.

Jerrica rolled her eyes, “All I know is, if you was never born, mommy would still be here and daddy woulda never drank himself to death.”

“Shut the FUCK up!” he screamed.

“Come make me, pussy boy!” Jerrica instigated.

That was it. Something inside of Darnell snapped. His inner demons were playing an aggressive game of ping pong with his mind. There was yelling, and crashing, some glass broke, then there was a gruesome thud and everything stopped.

When Darnell snapped out of his fit, he was standing over Jerrica. Her head had cracked against the sharp corner of the wooden coffee table. Blood seeped from the wound.

“Fuck. No… no, no, no.” Darnell dropped to his knees and cradled her head in his lap. Blood smeared into his clothes and across his skin. All he saw was red.

Jerrica looked up at him, unable to speak. Her eyes were wide, wild with fear. Her heart was racing. Then it slowed. Then it stopped.

Darnell wept.

***

Late that night, Darnell climbed into the passenger seat of a black 2017 Dodge Charger. He’d changed his clothes and carried a small duffle bag with him. “I really appreciate this, I ain’t know who else to turn to,” he admitted to the driver.

Julius turned to him with a slight grin before he grabbed Darnell’s shoulder, reassuringly, “It’s all good. I got you, bro.”

#short story #fiction #virginia #african american #urban #addiction #abuse

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