text: A shoe goes sailing through the air and crashes through a wall and into the coat closet behind. It doesn't take much; the wall is just a thin layer of sheet rock with unimaginative paper covering it. The sound of it rattles the whole place. I just sit on the couch and listen. My brother screams from his room less than two feet away. His small arm stretched out from under the door; his tiny fingers pulling at the medium length brown carpet. He cries out “why momma” as he pulls. I can tell he has snot running out of his nose and tears rolling down his cheeks, just from the sound of his voice. I just stand in the hall and listen. The phone rings, it’s my mother again. She asks in a manic voice why I’m punishing her. She tells me I don’t deserve her love. She pleads to know why I don’t love her back. I can hear the addict she is sleeping with in the back ground coughing; it’s the cough of too much cheap beer and even cheaper cigarettes. I just hold the phone and listen. I hear the voice of Tim Allen coming from the television behind me. The taste of Tuna Helper turns my stomach. I have tears running down my face. My father stands in the kitchen. He stops his lecture on starving children long enough to take a pull of his beer. I count the silence, almost four seconds. He must be mad at her again. She and my step brother laugh from the living room. I just lie on the table bench and listen. I ride with my grandmother in the Ram Charger. She smokes long skinny cigarettes with the windows rolled up. I love her, but I hate smell. I hold the button to roll my window down. She quickly rolls it back up. “The a/c is running,” she says. I feel a bit dizzy from the bluish smoke; I’ll probably have a headache soon. My brother sits in his booster seat behind us calling out truck each time he sees one. My grandmother speaks between draws from her cigarette to tell me she loves my brother, but that his mother is a whore. I just hold my breath and listen. The sun hasn’t gone down yet but I’m in bed. My step-mother is going out and my father has unhooked the ignition coil from the engine. It won’t run. She screams why, it sounds like my brother. He laughs and tells her he hasn’t done anything. I wonder if she is a whore as I spy and listen. I stand in the shower. The water is as hot as I can take. I gently squeeze the bottle of V05 and breathe it in. I hear my his alarm going off repeatedly. I know I need to get out, but he is vomiting violently into the toilet just on the other side of the glazed shower door. The water is turning cold. I begin to shiver as I listen. Chris Cornell’s voice pleads for a black hole sun through the small speakers of the Zenith tv. I see the headlights through the living room windows. I count the foot falls as they climb the steep steps to the trailer door. I can hear someone fumbling a key into the lock. She stumbles through first. “He drank too much tequila,” she says as she makes her way past me and down the hall. He claws his way in like a zombie and falls to the floor, the screen door slamming just shy of his feet. He is snoring before Chris is done. I bob my head and listen. The engine of the Honda screams for relief. The tires squeal as we barely make the deep curve of the small country road. “Your grandmother found your grandfather not breathing on the porch,” she says. I wonder if the car will fly off the road at the next turn, it’s sharper than the last. My mother tries to navigate at 90 and light a Virginia Slim at the same time. I light one for her. She doesn’t take her eyes off the road. Eric Clapton moans for Layla on the radio. I hold tight and listen. The ICU is cold and quiet. I watch the lines on the small monitor bounce to the rhythm of my grandfather’s heart. “He’s woken once,” my grandmother says to my great aunt. “He was talking to his mother.” She died when I was four, I think to myself. My mother walks in and hands my grandmother a styrofoam cup of sweet tea. I can hear the ice slide together as she takes a sip and hands the cup to me. I take my turn; it taste of earth and sugar. She smiles at me and gives me a peppermint. I save it for later. The three of them begin to make plans for if he doesn’t wake back up. I squeeze the peppermint and listen. The wind roars past my ears as I sit in the front seat of the boat. I take in a deep breath as my father slides the boat around an ox bow in the river. I let my vision soften as I stare at the reflection of the sky in the water. I raise my arm and point to a deadhead sticking just above the surface. I feel the boat shift just in time as my father pulls the tiller handle and deftly dodges the stump. He opens the throttle on the two stroke Mercury as we enter a straight part of the river. I close my eyes and pretend to fly as I listen.