I Saved My Own Life: TORN From the Inside Out

 

The Beginning

The room was small, the walls created a slight echo, or perhaps it was just my imagination. I had to go so far back into my mind that the present environment closed in on me. Of the five people in the room, Kathryn Shipp was the most imposing: she was 6 feet tall, stood military straight with sharply cropped blue-black hair, and blue eyes that were intense. She needed everything from me, she had to have the ‘feel’ of the whole story, not just the facts, so she demanded more than just a story, and she wanted a recreation of my life. Kathy Shipp was one of the best attorneys in the state and her client was a domestic abuse victim who had snapped and killed her abuser, so Kathy Shipp needed me to show her why a good little girl could empty a gun on a man with his back turned. I knew why she did it, I knew what she felt, and if it took revealing my soul to help, I would.

Torn From the Inside Out-A Memoir

Excerpted from Chapter One

Living on the Flower Bed of Eden

“You are living on the Flower Bed of Eden!”

Andrew Howard to Little Sara, age five

Arkansas, 1962

Thunder rattled the windowpanes two stories high, and lightning split the sky; it was as if the whole world was in turmoil that night. My nerves were keyed up as tight as piano strings, and in a sudden moment of stillness and silence it felt as though my heartbeat was amplified ten times over. He was over a hundred pounds greater than I, nearly a foot taller, and I knew he could move his muscled body into unbelievable sprints.  Rain started falling in torrents, while the storm raged outside. I was not afraid of the storms of nature; it was the storm inside this night that I knew I might not survive.

Anticipation was so great that I wanted to scream at him to get it over with, and true to my expectation he lunged for me, and my body did not disappoint me, I flew down the stairs two at a time in my bare feet. He stalled for mere seconds to enjoy his pronouncement of a death sentence upon me:

 “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU-YOU GOOD FOR NOTHING BITCH-STONE DEAD!”  He screamed.

It was February 13, of the year 1987, the night that I disappeared into a February rainstorm with five children and no place to go. I was twenty-nine years old.