We lived in a pink-colored house on a corner lot of a dead end street in Florida. Just a home of many homes we frequently moved into. The most secluded side of the house hid my secret joy, my sunflower ‘garden’. The elementary school I was attending taught me how to plant flowers, what seeds were, and how to make plants grow. I took some sunflower seeds home with me once while my teacher wasn’t looking and successfully had three flowers (that never lived to bear seeds of their own). I frequently switched bedrooms with my little brother, never satisfied for more than two weeks in one room, to which he reluctantly agreed it. We were often cared for by a neighbor two doors down, a gay couple in a wonderful wooden house. I remember going over everyday after school to play there just because it was so clean and I admired the cherry wood floors and how they would shine. One day, I remember waking up to go over to see if I could play with a puzzle of theirs when no one answered when I knocked. I creaked open the door and peered inside. No one. I knew that John was home, he was always home and his car was in the driveway so I mischievously let myself in and ran upstairs to jump out and surprise him – but much to my surprise, he was in bed sleeping. I crawled up onto the water bed and tried to shake him but he was stiff and looked odd. I ran out of the house to the neighbor’s house and got her to come check on him. Long story short, he had died just a couple hours previously of AIDS. I sat on the porch and watched the ambulance men take him out and I never saw John or his boyfriend, or the inside of their lovely house again. The once beautiful house became a haunted house, it was emptied out and left without tenants to grow disheveled and old.

Back in my pink house, the environment was quite the same. My stepfather was an alcoholic drug addict with a secret-not-so-secret love for little girls. There had been previous allegations against him from his real daughter, his first daughter. That’s why her mother fled with her and he never saw her again. My mother, just a victim of a terrible curse he placed upon her which killed her in the end, turned a blind eye to the evil doings of this man in the false pretense of love and duty and loyalty. Today there is a term for that – Stockholm Syndrome. During the time period of my previous writing, it was just my little brother and I, we had already lost the brother that was the middle child. Not lost by death, but lost by space – he was the lucky one, or was he? That’s a story for another day.

My mother use to dance around to classic rock in the pink house while she was cleaning. She was always the star in her song-and-dance routines and looking back, I always watched her endearingly, that someone so damaged could find happiness in pitch black. She smoked a pack a day easy, and we often argued about it and I often hid her cigarettes. My brother and I found an abandoned black puppy in the woods near our house. We named her BB (Black Beauty) and she definitely completed my brother and I’s happiness to the smallest extent. She was always joyful, tail wagging everyday when we woke up and everyday when we came home. Much like my mother’s classic rock and sashaying hips, BB was our escape. As temporary as everything was those years, BB wasn’t around for very long. To this day, I still have nightmare and see images of her death that haunt me. To this day, I still cry and my heart aches for her pain. We were too poor, parents too ignorant to understand puppy vaccinations. BB was heartworm positive and we had no idea. She was perhaps 11 weeks or 12 weeks old and one morning I ran outside before leaving for the bus and she was struggling on her side, wiggling a bit on the ground. I fretted and grab my mother and soon after, BB started vomiting great long worms from her mouth. I wrapped her up in an old blanket while watching her little paws kick around and her tongue loll from her mouth where the worms were everywhere. Then came the diarrhea and the blood, long worms protruding out of both ends of her. She struggled for a couple of hours and then died in my arms, wrapped in her blankie while I rocked her and sung to her. That was the second time I had experienced death, and the first time it had been to someone I loved. I carry a heavy amount of guilt for her death – I understand that I was a child – but the fear and pain in her eyes, and the body twitches, they haunt me. Of all the terrible things that I have been able to push out of memory, this I can’t. My poor little girl, my best friend, my little brother’s best friend. She was gone.

These are all the memories that I have of the pink house on the corner besides the nightly passing of the trains,  weekly police arrest of my stepdad for abusing my mother, to which she would plead for them not to take him, and then bail him out the next day. This was the house that I learned what masturbation was and also how it felt. This was the house that occupied some of the most and least traumatic experiences of my life. And of course, mine and my brother’s favorite little treehouse.