I walk home knowing what lies ahead. I want to take my time but that will only make it worse. My latest faster father doesn’t like it when I get home later than I’m supposed to.
Finally I get to the door and pause before entering, the last moments of calm that I will have until tomorrow when I walk back to school. I take a deep breath then open the door, as I turn to close it behind me my foster father calls out for me to get him another beer. I do what he says knowing what will happen if I don’t.
Once I hand it to him I go to the room that I share with the other two foster kids here. They are boy and girl, the girl is 6 and the boy is 8. They look up when I enter, their eyes momentarily scared before they see that it is only me. I smile at them, “did you guys eat lunch today?” I ask. Their classmates bully them about being in the system, they don’t always get lunch and here at this house there is no supper, only sometimes a small snack.
They both shake their heads. I sit in the middle of the room on the floor and quietly pull out the lunch that I got from the school, I saved it for them. Their eyes glow with hunger as they scramble to sit next to me. I rip the sandwich in half and give them each a piece. They immediately start eating as I pull out the fries that I also have, I also give them both about half of those too.
I sit and watch as their eyes slowly become less hungry. They finish their sandwiches and start on their fries. Just then the door opens and I scramble to hide the fries in my bag, but it’s useless, he has seen them. His eyes flash in anger, the kids scramble to go to their beds but he blocks them.
“Food?!” he yells, “Where the hell did you get food?”
He raises his hand to hit one of them. I stand up and step in-between them. “No, I won’t let you hurt them,” I say. The kids run to my bed and crouch on the corner against the walls.
His eyes flash with even more drunken anger as the first hit connects with my cheek. I don’t let any sound out, but the little girl screams. I look back up at the man standing in front of me. He hits me a second time, then shoves me to the floor. I try to pull myself back up onto my feet, but he won’t let me. He starts to kick me. When I try to get away he kicks my head causing everything to momentarily go black. He doesn’t stop.
I curl into a little ball, my hands protecting my head, my legs protecting my abdomen. He moves to the other side of me kicking my back and my head where my hands are. I try to get up again, but find that I don’t have the strength.
The beating keeps going on, and eventually everything goes black.

*****
The 911 comes from a scared little girl. The girl says that somebody else is there, that she is on the floor, that she was hit, that she is in pain. The little girl cries. Paramedics arrive at the small house. They put the beaten girl on a stretcher. The beaten girl struggles to breathe. At the hospital the doctors get to work on the girl, the paramedics leave.
The sound of a flat line rings through the trauma room. The doctors, as they always say, do their best to turn the deafening flat line into living breaths. But still the flat line rings through the air. Once the doctors have decided that she is a lost cause they call it. They call time of death.
Her body is taken to the morgue. She is placed inside one of those dark little refrigerators. Refrigerator number 206.
She is left there, forgotten in the darkness. Nobody claims her because there is nobody that loves her.
Nobody even realizes that she isn’t even there anymore.
She lies there in the cold darkness, forevermore.