Once, I asked my mother “What is the worst part of a car to break?” She said it was the radio. Weeks passed since I inquired and the famous question why? taunted me more each time I eyed her attend to the radio before the adjustment of her seat. Finally, I gave up on wasting countless hours in a desperate attempt to figure it out. It was practically a pant by the time the words “Why the radio? What about the engine? My god, we live in Florida, what about the air conditioner? Or the wind shield wipers? Why the radio?” frantically left my lips. She sat her Breakfast At Tiffany’s mug down carefully and stared at me as if I were a foreign figure rather than her daughter of sixteen years. “You never want a radio to break because without it, you’d be able to hear all of the other problems rattling around.”
I went to bed satisfied with her response. She must be right, too. For it wasn’t until a silence fell around our shoulders that I realized we had been malfunctioning for quite some time.
Abby Kalen Belanger is a junior in high school, attending a School for the Arts for Creative Writing. She has been writing short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction since the age of eight and aspires to continue as a professional upon obtaining a Master’s Degree for Creative Writing.
