With my little seven-year-old hand, I tried turning the knob to our front door, but it wouldn’t open.
I tried again. This time, I used both hands and all the kid muscle I could summon, putting my whole body into the job like pro wrestler Hulk Hogan did against his rival André the Giant. The damn thing wouldn’t budge.
I stepped over to the edge of the porch and studied our gravel driveway for a good long minute. It was empty. My step-mom Mary’s Buick Riviera should have been there, long and smug and impossible to miss. It wasn’t.
The thing is, Dad never locked our house. This was all Mary’s doing.
I sat down on the front steps and let out a sigh. It was a blistering summer afternoon. I remember the heat. Oklahoma was hot as hades. It didn’t fool around. The air was thick enough to lean on. It pressed against my chest and stayed there. My t-shirt was soaked through with that particular brand of sweaty-boy perspiration. I had just come back from playing in the neighborhood. I was thirsty. I was hungry.
There are moments in childhood when the world suddenly feels very large, and you feel very small inside it. This was one of mine.
This was also, I decided, another fine example of why I hated my step-mom, otherwise known as the witch.
I knew, even then, that witches came in two flavors. There were the storybook good kind—the helpful, sparkly ones who dispensed wisdom, soothing soup, and second chances—and then there were the others, the bad kind who specialized in curses, slammed doors, and creative uses of household objects. Mary, in my taxonomy, was not the wand-waving, sing-a-song variety. She was the kind who smiled while stirring the pot, just to see who was paying attention.
The title felt accurate at the time. It had the right economy. My list of grievances was a mile long, and even at seven, I appreciated that the best lists are built from contrast. One minute, she could be sweet and thoughtful—taking me out to shop for a new coat and a mother-and-son Chinese dinner at Three Towers (epic salad dressing!), leaning across the table to ask about my day, like we were characters in a Hallmark movie. The next minute, she could be beating me with a shoe like I was a dirty house rug, her face set with a focus reserved for competitive sports.
I learned early that her mood was like Tornado Alley. It could start as blue sky—quiet, almost pleasant—so uneventful you thought for a split second you were acting in a scene straight out of the beloved television series Leave It to Beaver. Then the air would shift. Pressure would build. Nothing was broken yet, but everything felt unstable. Ordinary sounds would feel too loud. You didn’t need a siren to know something was coming; your body learned to read the signs before your brain did. The irony, of course, was that I actually grew up there, in the real Tornado Alley, where danger at least followed rules—Doppler radars, Gary England’s legendary warnings on Channel 9, a chance to take cover or get to the basement. With her, there was no warning. Just debris afterward, like a cast-iron skillet through my bedroom window aimed at Dad, and the unspoken expectation that you help clean it up and pretend the house had always looked that way.
My life, I discovered, was better when she wasn’t in it. Or at least when she wasn’t in the same room. Distance was safety. Silence was strategy. I sat on those steps weighing my options. Wander around the neighborhood like a lost puppy. Stay put and hope someone notices.
Remembering my long walk from Walmart to Grandma and Grandpa’s, I decided to stay put.
What I felt was hard to name: the understanding that I was abandoned, and that this was not the first time it would happen. One time, Dad and Mary left me and my sister Anna alone in the car while they partied all night at a friend’s house. It poured rain. The car was hot and sticky, the windows fogged with our own breath, and the smell of damp upholstery made it feel like the inside of a sauna. Outside, the storm thrashed. Inside, we sat, trapped, waiting. I remember how the rain pelted the roof like someone mocking us, and how every minute dragged itself out.
I eventually moved from the porch to the sidewalk, where I baked in the sun for what seemed like an hour or two.
Then, to my surprise, a police cruiser eased into our driveway. It hadn’t announced itself with sirens—it had simply appeared. The car’s engine ticked. I sat still, staring. My heart sped up, not with fear exactly, but with the odd thrill of seeing something completely unexpected. The universe had quietly intervened, and it made me feel—strangely—noticed.
The driver’s side door opened, and an officer stepped out. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and moved with the easy authority of someone used to people paying attention. He approached.
“Do you live here?” he asked, towering over me.
“Yes,” I said, pointing behind me.
“Where’s your mom?”
“I… I don’t know,” I admitted, my voice small. The words sounded foreign coming out of my mouth, like a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell.
He crouched down to get closer to my level. “Has she been gone a long time?”
“Yes,” I said again. My stomach tightened. I wanted to tell him Mary was a bad mom, but I didn’t.
The officer shook his head in disbelief. “What’s your name, son?”
“Jeremiah,” I answered.
“Jeremiah, I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”
He opened the passenger door and guided me in with a hand at my back—not pushing, just there. The seat felt enormous. I swung my legs in and watched them dangle, not quite reaching the floor. He reached across and pulled the seatbelt over me, clicking it into place with a practiced motion.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
I nodded.
The door shut with a solid sound.
He walked around the front of the car and climbed in. The radio crackled softly, voices I couldn’t understand. He turned the key, and the cruiser rolled backward, easing us out of the driveway.
We drove down Maine Street past the Safeway Supermarket, past the Cherokee Terrace Apartments, past the Pak-A-Sak.
He glanced over at me. “I’m taking you to a place where kids stay for a little while. Just until we figure things out.”
I stared out the window, wondering what’s going to happen to me next.
At Garfield Furniture, we turned right at the corner of Maine Street and South Van Buren, passing through downtown and the IBM building. A couple of blocks later, the cruiser slowed, and we pulled into a small lot. The engine idled. He shut it off.
“This is it,” he said.
He opened my door and helped me out, resting a hand lightly on my shoulder. He walked me to the front steps. My new home for the moment was a two-story red-brick building with an arched entry.
After digging around online, I believe the address was 317 North Grand Avenue. Originally constructed by the Salvation Army in 1900 or 1927, and renovated in 1970, the vacant building last served as the headquarters of the Cimarron Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
I paid no attention to this detail when the officer walked me in, but on the northwest corner of the building is a dedication plaque with the inscription that reads: ERECTED TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE GOOD OF HUMANITY 1927 FIELD MAJOR & MRS STUART CORPS OFFICERS MAJOR L.C. BENNETT DIV COMMANDER.
I would deduce that by the ‘80s, the building was an Oklahoma Department of Human Services-operated children’s shelter, but I’m not entirely sure.
On this day, God was looking after me, and this building would show humanity’s goodness.
Inside, the place looked tired. The walls were grimy, and it smelled like boiled vegetables and dirty socks. The air didn’t move. I could hear children—coughing, laughing, crying, it was hard to tell which was which.
A woman greeted us. The officer exchanged a few quiet words with her—adult words, procedural words—and then he was gone. Just like that. I stood there clutching myself, suddenly aware that this was not a place you arrived at with luggage or choices.
I was plopped into what I would call the living room with kids of varying ages and sizes. A few were dressed in shirts a size too big. Pants cuffed and sneakers with softened soles.
Everyone’s hair looked brushed quickly or not at all. Their faces were clean enough, but not glowing.
Some of the kids made themselves small—shoulders pulled in, eyes down, bodies angled away from attention. Others did the opposite: loud voices, exaggerated movements, humor turned up too high, like they’re trying to outrun being invisible.
A few like me sat very still so as not to invite questions.
As the TV blared, I looked around, thinking this place was like that bleak New York City orphanage in the movie Annie, but without the singing. I was just waiting for the cruel matron, Miss Hannigan, to pop out any second, but she never did. I decided this place was like a holding pen for kids whose lives had been upended. It sure wasn’t a home, but I knew I was safe.
The evening dragged on, and eventually Mary appeared before dark to pick me up. I don’t remember a hug or an I’m so sorry. As I write this story, Dad told me last night that Mary had never shared this incident with him. That was the kind of witch she was.
Word Count: 1,644
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Start with a problem, not a preface.
This story opens with a locked door and a small body trying to solve it. No explanations. No backstory. The reader is immediately placed inside a dilemma.
Try This: Begin your memoir scene with something that won’t work—a door, a relationship, a moment that resists you. Let tension do the announcing.
2. Let the child’s scale set the stakes.
Everything is sized to a seven-year-old: the heat, the thirst, the porch, the fear. The world feels large because the narrator feels small.
Try This: When writing about early life, don’t explain how serious it was. Show how big it felt then. Shrink the lens to your age.
The Middle
3. Use metaphor as an organizing principle, not decoration.
The “witch” isn’t just a nickname—it becomes a system for understanding chaos, unpredictability, and danger. Tornado Alley reinforces the idea.
Try This: Find one metaphor your younger self believed. Let it quietly organize the scene instead of stopping to interpret it.
4. Alternate danger with normalcy.
Sweet dinners, sitcom calm, then sudden violence. This contrast mirrors how unstable homes actually feel—and keeps the reader off balance.
Try This: Pair the ordinary with the unsettling. Memoir gains power when the threat disrupts something that seems almost normal.
The End
5. Let intervention speak softly.
The police officer doesn’t deliver a speech. He buckles a seatbelt. He says, “I’m going to take you somewhere safe.” That’s enough.
Try This: When help arrives in your story, don’t inflate it. Describe the gesture, not the virtue. Readers recognize goodness without cues.
6. End with a quiet, clarifying fact.
The final sentence doesn’t rage. It reveals: the father never knew. That single detail reorders the entire story.
Try This: Close with information, not emotion. The right fact, placed last, will do the emotional work for you.
