A Short Story: The Last Time I Cried

Hey everyone!  I present to you a very sad story about one of the characters in the book I am writing.  It is a short, but very important, part of her backstory crammed into only 1,500 words.  

Please enjoy and comment your thoughts below! 

 The newsboy’s hat tumbles off my head and into the puddle of water in front of me, getting drenched by waves.  It never has fit well, I have been on the lookout for a new one, but I don’t like stealing.  

I can’t do it anymore.  Plunging my fingers into my cropped red hair I dive into the memories that I have been working so hard to resist.  They come crashing back along with the waves and I am transported to a place so wildly different, a place clogged with sweat and grime rather than sand and seawater: the mines.  I know I won’t return from those choked and dirty skies until I relive every moment from my last days there.  Still, I am relieved that I can do it in the salty breeze, far away from any soot.     

The air is clogged with ash, especially after my father arrives home, ash sticks to him.  The mines are a place where one goes into the earth and gets so dirty it seems as if their skin will change permanently.  Most of the men who work in the mines live nearby and have family stuck in the dark houses near them.  Ever since 1929, the money seems to shrink.  We merely survive and that is all.  

Arriving next to my mother I place my hand on her round belly.  She barely acknowledges me, she looks exhausted and I wonder if she has had anything to eat today.  I wait to feel a kick from life inside.  I wait for something from the spark that will clean the skies as it brings us a little bit of happiness.  It doesn’t come.  

One day, everything just seemed to get even worse, somehow.  

“Pearl!” Running towards my mother’s urgent voice, my feet slap the floor and pins and needles climb up my foot.  Shaking the feeling from my feet I run into the wall just before the hall ends and see my mother’s face.  She looks concerned for me, in a funny sort of way, but that is it.  The terror from her voice does not match her eyes.  

I look from her eyes to her arms but they are empty.  I am an older sister now and my baby brother is not where he should be.  He was born a month early, and he is small, too small, but his belly still rises and falls.  

“Help me with breakfast,” she asks but looks away from me and doesn’t look back all morning. We all eat together, even my father who, ever since we have lived here, leaves with the orange sun.  My baby brother has been in his arms all morning, not my mother’s but my father’s.  Today he never leaves the house, and no one tells me why.  

Mother doesn't say anything about it either, she continues on as if nothing has changed.  But something has changed and I can’t quite place what it is except that the tone that came with a new baby is not a happy one.  

I step outside right before bed, breathing in the cool, night air.  I end up coughing and sink to the ground.  If it were any other season dust would be sitting in the corners of our small outside area, but it’s not, it’s winter and the ground is cold and hard.   

I walk back inside and immediately wish I hadn’t.  Mother is rushing around and she holds a couple of my simple gray dresses.  Right away I notice that a large tear runs down the edge of one.  She stuffs them into a canvas bag, grabs some bread, and even a piece of fruit, and places it on top.  

“Pearl,” Pulling me closer she puts me on a chair and looks directly at me with terrified eyes that seem to vibrate as she searches my face.  This time her eyes match her voice.  

  “Your father lost his job, he’s not the only one.  It’s like the world has run out of money,” she tells me.  Ordinarily, she would laugh, ‘the world has run out of money’, it’s such an outlandish statement.  But she doesn't laugh.  

We are leaving the very next day.

And I cried, standing there realizing that everything would change.   

I wanted to make my mother sad. Looking back I almost feel bad for that intention, but it was strange how my mother just stood there watching me.  She wasn’t sad enough.  She didn’t need to send me away, but she had convinced herself that it was the best option just as much as I had known it wasn't.  I didn’t have as big of a say in it as she did.  I didn’t have a say at all.  

I wake hours earlier than normal and walk all around our little house, barely two rooms big.  Finding where my baby brother sleeps I lean down, place my ear against his body, and listen to him breathe. Wrapped in a thin white blanket, he doesn't open his eyes, his breaths are shallow, and I notice that there seems to be a break between each rise of his belly.  

I would soon learn how that was a bad sign.  

My parents wake up a moment later and begin frantically throwing things in bags and grabbing bits of food. They do this until a sharp pounding begins on the door.  My heart starts to beat fast as I stand, unmoving in the middle of the room.  It sounds like someone is about to break the house down.  However, as soon as my parents hear this they grab bags and push me, and my stuff out the back door. 

I watch from just outside as my mother grabs the baby seconds before she leaves, almost like he is an afterthought, like she almost forgot.  

I didn’t realize it at the time but this also was a bad sign.

Hurrying away, we don’t look back.  It sounds like a cliche but it’s true.  We are supposed to act like people walking, not escaping out the back of our own house.  Stepping into a heap of snow, goosebumps pop up all over my arms.  Similar piles line each corner of the street.  I am not wearing stockings, only a long-sleeved dress, and I am cold. 

It feels like we have walked an hour but it can’t have been that long.  A train is next to us now and my father grabs my mother’s arm and nods towards it.  She nods back and they pull me aside. 

“Come,” my mother mutters, squeezes my hand, and doesn’t loosen the grasp.  We step through piles of snow that almost reach my thighs until we are next to the train.  Father picks me up, sets me against the boxcar’s edge, and stares at me like he wants to memorize my face as he traces my pale arm.  

“You’ll be alright, I know it.”  He steps back, trading spots with my Mother.  

“There will be lots for you to figure out,” she says with a rushed urgency, “say you’ll do a job for a meal, do it gladly and your best,” 

I had no idea what she meant.  She told this to me, her eleven-year-old daughter who had never spent a day alone, expecting me to be okay.  I did seem okay, at least on the surface.  

She proceeds to set my baby brother down on my lap.  Leaning down she kisses my head, my brothers’, and then pushes us both into the boxcar.    

“What?” I scream back, “I can’t!” was all I could say.  I have no food to feed him with but my mother seems to know something I do not.  

“Goodbye, my Pearl!”  My father yells as the train screams.  And all I can do is scream back.  I never understood my father but I understand nothing about him now.  How can he do this?  How can he yell such a happy-sounding goodbye?  How can he say ‘my Pearl?’

I turn away before they disappear completely, and cradle my brother, trying to warm him.  I kiss his forehead to show I love him, even though I may be the only one.    

And I was.  He died in my arms an hour later and I cried over his lifeless body.  

A lump rises in my throat so prominent that I can’t imagine it disappearing.  I cry like I never had when my parents left, I cried over the boy who never received a name. 

I wanted to name him something but thought of nothing.  He was never really here and it couldn’t be a normal name.  I decided against naming him in the end, but I knew I had loved him, if even for only an hour.  I like to think he loved me too, if only for my warmth.  I continued to cry that day, over someone I never really knew, over someone who never knew me.  And I haven’t cried since. 

Thank you for reading! 

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