Prose

I always seemed to find myself walking. There was never much to see on the dull, except for polluted skies and polluted people, but I still walked. I guess it was one of the only outlets I had. I lived in Atlantic City, deep in the heart of the city and deep in the heart of the ghetto. I grew up with four younger and two older siblings in a one-story house. My parents had jobs, but they never really got much above minimum wage. Life was a constant struggle, always cutting every corner and every coupon to survive, so no one really had the time to focus on me much. It was simply easier on everyone if I just helped out where I could and keep quiet the rest of the time. School wasn’t much better. I didn’t trust a person in that trash heap of a school. Every teacher was too busy caring about kids with higher grades and every kid was too busy caring about kids with higher popularity than me to even throw me a second glance. It never really bothered me much, though. I learned early on how to sustain myself and rely on nobody but me. Sometimes I craved a real friend, or even a girlfriend, but I never really put much of an effort into getting one or the other. They, honestly, weren’t worth my time. So instead, I just walked.
That’s what I was doing that day. Walking. It had been an especially irritating day. I failed some history test I didn’t even know about, and the teacher called my mom. Apparently, my “academic attitude” was sucky and I needed to step my grades up if I wanted to go anywhere other than the slums. Mom went ballistic. She never really cared about our grades (hell, she dropped out when she was seventeen, why would she care?) but the second she got a call from some nasty old witch of a teacher, you got a serious beating. It was hypocritical, but I wasn’t allowed to tell her so. She yelled at me for a solid ten seconds before one of my little sisters started shrieking in the next room. She gave me a vicious look and growled “Just you wait until your father gets home.” before she ran to tend to my sister. I wasn’t scared of beatings anymore, 16 years of them gave you time to get used to the pain, but they aggravated me to no end. I needed to get out of that house somehow. Since I couldn’t just waltz out the front door with my mom in the kitchen, I went into the room I shared with my brothers and locked the door behind me.
One other way I loved to get stress out was working out. I absolutely adored it, the sweat, the effort, the feel of metal in your hands, just everything. And it left you with some pretty sweet muscles to boot. My dad got me some used dumbbells and a pull-up bar for my 11th birthday. I was always a small kid, so maybe they hoped I would bulk up enough to win any fight I got tangled into while walking the streets. While I restrained myself from becoming a downright behemoth, I could pack a punch. And hey, better I work out than hit one of my little brothers to relieve stress, right?
I had been mechanically lifting my metal dumbbells for 15 minutes or so when I felt a strange kind of mental autopilot take over me. Without really thinking about it, I unlatched the window, swung my legs over, and hopped down onto the old mulch in my front yard. I had done this before, but never when I was in trouble, and never when it was… so late. I glanced over at the skyscraper-like hotels, their giant forms looming like nephilim in the vivid orange sunset. But hey, I was already out here. Might as well take a walk.
My feet slapped against the worn, cracked sidewalk. Even though I went somewhere different in the city almost every time I went out, I never really got lost. Maybe I have some kind of inner compass. Or, maybe I just looked for Revel in the skyline when I got confused to get my bearings. I passed by the closed Sister Jean’s Soup Kitchen and smiled in fondness. The brown, shambled building gave us enough food when times were really tough. I ran my hand down the untrimmed hedges as I walked by. I allowed myself to get lost in my thoughts as I crossed a busy intersection. Up ahead in the distance, I noticed a street that I had never really went down before. I stopped, hesitant to turn onto a street where God knows what could be living on. I peered down the road. It looked like any other row of houses, dirty and sullen and lifeless. It was all a bunch of the same, so I figured I would just a little bit different version of the same thing if I went down that way. So I did.
What happened next flashed by in merely a blur. I heard the pitter-patter of multiple pairs of feet running behind me. I whirled around feverishly, scared of getting jumped. A white blast of light blinded me as something metal was slammed into my temple. The last thing I remember was being dragged into an alley before I completely blacked out.