In Chap­ter Eight of *If These Wings Could Fly*, the nar­ra­tor finds her­self ensnared in the ten­sion of her house­hold, specif­i­cal­ly in her room while prepar­ing for a cal­cu­lus assign­ment. Despite her inten­tions to focus, her anx­i­ety grows as she antic­i­pates her father’s immi­nent out­burst, a cycle she knows all too well. The atmos­phere becomes unnerv­ing­ly qui­et, prompt­ing her to slip out of her room, dri­ven by a mix of fear and curios­i­ty to lis­ten. She under­stands that the dread of antic­i­pat­ing the con­flict is often worse than the actu­al event, wish­ing for the tur­moil to begin to reclaim a fleet­ing sense of safe­ty after it pass­es.

Peer­ing out her win­dow, she observes her father deal­ing with a trash bag in the yard, a task that stirs a deep­er sense of unrest. His truck, embla­zoned with “BARNES CONSTRUCTION,” caters to the expec­ta­tion of fam­i­ly pride, yet she knows the truth—that her father’s dreams of foot­ball glo­ry were crushed by an injury, rel­e­gat­ing him to local leg­end sta­tus, thus leav­ing a lega­cy of unre­al­ized poten­tial entwined with anger and dis­ap­point­ment.

When the nar­ra­tor notes the mess on the truck, sul­lied by crow drop­pings, it sym­bol­izes much more than a pet­ty incon­ve­nience; it’s a reflec­tion of their chaot­ic life. Her father’s anger man­i­fests as he dis­cards trash reck­less­ly, pro­vid­ing fod­der for the townsfolk’s jokes and her own under­ly­ing fear. The pres­ence of her moth­er, pas­sive­ly try­ing to main­tain order, only exac­er­bates the nar­ra­tor’s feel­ings of help­less­ness.

As the night pro­gress­es, ten­sion esca­lates when a dish slips from her moth­er’s hands, which incites fur­ther anger from her father, result­ing in shat­ter­ing glass scat­tered across the floor. In a moment of des­per­a­tion, the nar­ra­tor defends her moth­er, but this only earns her father’s ire. He storms out, tem­porar­i­ly leav­ing the fam­i­ly in the after­math of his rage.

Right after, the nar­ra­tor tries to com­fort her moth­er as they clean up the bro­ken glass, under­scor­ing the dis­qui­et that hangs over their house­hold. Her moth­er’s lament that things weren’t always this way stark­ly con­trasts with the nar­ra­tor’s per­cep­tion that her father’s anger is a con­stant in their lives. The chap­ter clos­es with the nar­ra­tor con­tem­plat­ing the nature of their father’s rage, pon­der­ing whether he needs them present to fuel it—reflecting on a painful truth that res­onates with­in their fraught exis­tence.