Melissa's Honor

Chapter 4

Chapter 4





Melissa’s trip on the straight, flat, boring highway across Utah brought her back to memories when she was a girl growing up in San Diego. The house she grew up in was an old abandoned condo complex that her grandfather bought and moved his whole family into. The complex had eight condo’s, the roofs leaked and threatened to blow away after any serious windstorm. Six generations sprawled among the livable two bedroom condo’s, bedraggled trees “landscaped” the unmaintained eighth block lot and children’s toys littered the grounds: tricycles, Barbie play-sets from Goodwill,  tea sets, various action figures, train sets and the like.





On a sunny morning when the older children were in school or selling merchandise on the streets, Melissa played by herself with her tea set, a tea party with Strawberry Shortcake, Barbie and friends on the broken concrete sidewalk. Melissa was about four years old at the time, but she remembered all to well the shooting that took place that day.


A group of three men knocked on the door to her father and mother’s condo, which they shared with Melissa’s four older sisters. The men knocked on the door, waited until her mother opened it up. They shoved her out of the way, their hand gripping large black guns. One of them waited outside, his weapon in front of him. Melissa hid herself behind a large bush, hoping to remain unnoticed to the men.





It was then that she saw her mortal enemy: the big black tarantula that had hidden under her pillow the night before and scared her so badly she had to sleep at the foot of her parent’s bed. She was terrified of the tarantula and began to back away from the bush when she heard two loud shots and her mother began screaming such a high pitched scream that Melissa heard it even in her dreams as an adult. The two men inside the condo joined the third one, taking her mother with them. Her father had reneged on some deal, she realized much later. It cost him his life and her mother's soul.





Melissa's mother didn't come back home that night. Three days later, she was dumped off at the front of the complex, bloody, clothes torn, unable to walk. She had four broken bones, a broken arm, cracked ribs, and she would never be able to have children again. Melissa's mother took to the numbing effects of drugs and alchol, as much as she could get as often as she could indulge. Honoria was the walking dead from that day on. Melissa's older sisters took over the raising of Melissa, not trusting their mother to treat the young girl as a daughter.





Pulling her mind back from her father’s death, she looked at her gas gage and realized she better find gas soon. A green sign greeted her from the side of the road, marking Wyoming as a few less hundred miles away than when she had first started. Halfway through her journey, Melissa was ready to land and make a new life again, somewhere that she didn’t have to hear screams in her dreams or become wary when men with guns crossed her path. A blue sign came up after a few minutes, promising a rest stop, food, gas and a place to take a shower if she wanted one. With her hand on her dog’s head, she put her blinker on and took the exit ramp.








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