Nighttime Nuance

When I stood at the dining room window eating my cereal, watching the dark backyard, listening to the rain, I had the urge to fling my cereal, spill my milk all outside pour it down the windowsill liquid mixing and lapping and running together becoming a pool on the cement below for the day had been the kind when everything melted and blended and sloshed together all of it making nonsense each minute a tumultuous wreckage of its own. Like that morning, my mother had a breakdown and something inside her mothering brain had told her to punish me for a forgotten chore. “Mail can’t sit in the mailbox all night.” My loathsome trip to school no transportation feet slap-slap-slapping the pavement I arrived twenty minutes late to my twenty-minute homeroom. Teacher scowl carving into my self-esteem with sharp words and harsh reprimands my façade crumbles around me. Shoved violently in the hall my neck snapped crack like a baseball striking a bat “Losers don’t deserve to live.” But someone stepped in. Someone stepped forward – for me. No one’s stepped forward – for me – before. Black black night with rain drizzles slicing the dark air clean. That’s what had happened to me. Someone wiped my ugly heart clean. Someone standing up for me and not even knowing that the lunacy had ground to a stop, disappearing as quickly as the fake smile that slips off my chin as soon as mother’s back is turned. Milk and cinnamon toast crunch never tasted so good.