A Day in South Point

By: Malik Mullins

  “Somebody done got killed again,” my dad said while he was on the phone. I was sitting in the front seat of his old raggedy-green Honda. All I could hear is police sirens. 11-year-old me is used to the sound of police sirens every day and every night. I can almost hum every pitch perfectly cause I hear them so often.

As we’re pulling out of the corner store we saw a group of hoodlums and a bunch of bikes standing up against the wall and on the floor and a bunch of people just sitting in front of the store like it was a party or something going. On the way home, my dad was still talking on the phone with his buddies and they’re trying to solve a puzzle through the phone to figure out what happened or who got killed. While they keep going, I’m trying to figure that if he’d let me play outside today.

As we got closer to home, I asked him. He sighed, looked at his phone to check the time, and laid out the usual warnings, where I can and can't go. We pulled into our apartment complex and saw the big sign that read “South Point.”

It was about 5:30pm and would get dark at about 8 o'clock. As we drove through the apartment complex, I was looking out the window and at the dirty dark orange buildings.  Some old heads outside were smoking cigarettes and drinking canned beer with a brown paper bag over it to keep their hands from getting cold. In front of us were these kids, in the road, throwing a football or on bikes and acting like there wasn’t a rush of vehicles trying to get by.

The car finally parked and I was about to rush out the car. My dad stopped me in my tracks and said “I hope you heard what I said.” I barely heard him.