“SICILY!” My older, half brother was pounding on my door, shouting my name, sounding distressed, “Sicily, I’m sorry! Okay? I tried! I tried okay?!” I was sitting in my room, holding our father’s forty-five colt to my head.

A month ago my boyfriend left me and our illegitimate daughter at my brother’s house. I loved him.

I really did but since he left me with no trace and just a note,

“I don’t fucking care Jaime! You never cared! Tony never cared! You left me and dad on our own! And now Tony has left me and our fucking DAUGHTER all alone! No one ever cares!” I was in hysterics, screaming and crying with the pistol pressed to my temple.

Then I heard something I never wanted to hear,

“Sicily?” It was Tony’s voice.

After a month he came back. He came back to Alexandra and I.

No he didn’t.

He’d never come back for me.

Or her.

I pressed the gun harder against my skull and cocked the hammer back. Alexandra, who had been lying in her crib nest to my bed, began crying. I hated when she cried. She sounded just like Tony when he cried,

“I’m sorry, Tony.” My voice came out in a whisper as I apologized to him, “I love you Jaime. I love you Alexa. Free me; Sweet death”

I applied pressure and then boom.

I was gone.

Sicilia-Marie Rose Preciado was dead.

Not that she hadn’t been dead for a long time.

She died a month ago.

After the birth of her illegitimate child.

Let me go back and tell you her story.

It starts many a moon ago at a club in downtown San Diego with me, Jaime, and some of his guy friends all going out to celebrate something. What I will never remember but from that night sprung a chain of events that will forever haunt me.

Notes

This story is completed and had been written when I was severely depressed and slipping down a steep steep slope. When Sicily left it kind of felt like some kind of weight was lifted off my shoulders.