Interview with a native Houstonian
“He was straddled her chest pinning her arms down and was punching her in her face over and over again. We were there and heard her screaming. We came to the bedroom and there he was. He was sitting on top of the twins with his whole weight pressing her belly down. She was pinned to the bed and could not move. She couldn’t shield her face because of the way he was straddling her.”
“What did you do?”
“I fainted, I don’t know what my brother did.”
“From that day forward, I did not trust them nor anyone else. There are monsters in the closet, under the bed and in the dark. The first ones were my parents.”
“I am sorry.”
“I have that picture burned into my memory forever. I will never forget it.”
The Wrong Turn
In South Houston, where the heat clung to the air like a second skin and the cicadas hummed their endless song, there lived a boy named Micah. He was born minutes after his fraternal twin sister, Mira, who arrived quiet and observant, her dark eyes already studying the world. Micah came loud, restless, and already reaching for things he shouldn’t.
From childhood, Micah seemed to have a compass that pointed everywhere except true north. If there were two choices before him, he unfailingly chose the one that led to trouble. If a teacher asked for honesty, he offered mischief. If a friend needed help, he delivered chaos. It wasn’t cruelty—just a kind of tragic instinct, like a bird flying into windows because it sees sky where there is none.
Mira hated him fiercely. She was the one who tortured him, who whispered evil suggestions he never needed, who sat beside him under the carport outside the home that the GI bill paid for. In heat and silence and confusion they grew up in a city that offered positive experiences and opportunities yet for Mira her way was to cheat. She always wanted more than what she was born for. She didn’t want her station in life. As for Micah, he felt that the only life was one that broke every law. They were damaged as fetus. How do you explain to a child who is damaged from birth that the reason everything they do is wrong; their feelings, their insights, their thought processes, everything about them.
But Houston is a hard city for a boy who couldn’t find his footing. By seventeen, Micah was running with people who fed on his confusion, who praised his recklessness, who taught him that the wrong thing could feel like belonging. By twenty, he had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed.
The day he was sentenced, Mira pressed her palm to the glass in the courtroom hallway, trying to catch his eyes. He looked everywhere but at her. Confusion was a heavy thing, and Micah had carried it so long it had become part of his posture.
Years passed. Prison hardened him, but it also hollowed him. Mira came to visit him in prison to flaunt her freedom. Mira was excited when he went to jail. She hated him and everyone. She could not love even if she wanted to. She was this evil embodiment who bragged about having sex with spiritual entities. She longed for her Aunt to die so she could cash the life insurance policy she had on her and take all of the pictures and other objects… when Mira’s own daughter suffered Mira also begged the God of the Dead to take the child. Mira desired more money over anything else. She did not love anything, not even herself. She certainly did not love her twin.
A tumor had begun blooming beautifully in her brain, slow and merciless. By the time doctors found it, it had already taken her speech, then her movement, then her awareness. She lay in a hospice room in Houston, surrounded by machines that hummed like distant thunder. Her body remained, but Mira—the girl who snarled at the world completely—was gone long before her heart stopped. The earth exhaled because a great evil had lost its home.
Micah never knew. He had deleted everyone from his visitors list long ago. The prison was his world. He became Muslim. He prayed all day, each and every day. He was part of a community that gave him direction, and communication he could comprehend. The prison chaplain told him about Mira, Micah accepted the news, she was never a sister to him. She was his tormenter. He carried the truth like a stone in his chest until the weight finally dissipated in silent tears as he prayed before Allah the Most Merciful. For the first time that chain was broken.
One humid August morning, Micah collapsed in the prison yard. The guards shouted, the inmates scattered, and the sky above Beaumont stretched wide and indifferent. His heart failed — too much life lived in the shadow of wrong choices. The information that could have helped him and Mira was never told to them; they were both brutalized invitro, that they both died during labor, that they had to delivered via C-Section.
At the exact moment Micah fell, he saw the snarling Mira this jolted back to the world. The prison guards were spooked. They knew that those who died on the yard never “came back”. The chaplain said it was mercy. The brothers said it was Allah The Benevolent.
In Houston, the cicadas kept singing. The heat kept rising. And somewhere in the quiet spaces between memory and confusion, one soul out of the two got a clarifying second chance at life. Micah was soon paroled and went through the transition from institutional life to true freedom and respect. The day he was released he met with his Imam who had supported him for years. He met with his other brothers who had also been paroled. The key however was finding out that he was damaged before he was ever born and no one helped him then he experienced death, came back and his cerebral injury was corrected. Whatever was blocked and not functioning Allah in His Mercy healed it. Micah had emerged from prison a new person.
Now that he understood and knew his own story, he had a clear mind. He knew what he wanted. He wanted a life. He was still able to go on with his life changing his name and being completely devoted to his faith and the chaste Muslim lady by his side who would become the wife he never dreamed he would have. She made him a father many times over and he embraced the responsibility with grace and devotion. More than anything he enjoyed being a community leader and speaking with lawyers and surgeons about what it was like living in “The Allegory of The Cave” and to know being in the sunlight. Micah went on to live beyond his 100th birthday, a respected and beloved man by all who knew him. When he passed they inscribed his favorite saying on his black granite tomb:
“There is an obstacle that is moved in its own time. Continue to pray and keep your faith with patience and grace.”
Somewhere in Beaumont, Texas a flock of doves take flight soaring in the clear sunlight.
Source: What is glioblastoma (GBM)? | UT MD Anderson
Source: Parole Office Beaumont TX: Your Guide to Success! – TexasInsight.blog
Disclaimer: This short story and all other stories on this blog are a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places in this current dimension and in all the worlds for eternity are is purely a coincidence.
Resource: If you or someone you know is struggling with domestic violence, please contact Domestic Violence Support | National Domestic Violence Hotline right now!
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