YWC contest entries

Fourteen Years

The hands of the clock in the kitchen click into place with a muffled snap and a minute later, her phone lights up with an obviously scheduled message--Merry Christmas! Love from the whole family, and we hope that your day be blessed. The number doesn't show up as anyone in her contacts, but it's not really a difficult conclusion to reach that it's her mom texting her. She isn't sure when her mom stopped being in her contexts, and she isn't really sure she cares, either. She's about to dismiss the notification when another message comes through--Are you driving down?

Are you coming back home? her mom asked, and she pictures her sitting at the kitchen table in her red and green plaid flannel bathrobe that she only gets out around Christmas, her greying hair tucked into a bun slowly unravelling and lipstick cracked and fading, squinting behind prescription glasses as she taps keys on presumably her brand-new iPhone 6s.

Or perhaps her mom is lying in bed, curled up and staring at the screen as she herself does far too often, with her back to the wall, facing cold side of the bed.

Because her father isn't home, or if he is, he certainly isn't in bed. She isn't sure of what he's doing, not in the same way can picture her mother, but he's not in bed, and he certainly isn't at church.

Perhaps her mother has their bedroom door open, waiting for the man she isn't entirely sure will come back at all, perhaps she's staring out her open door at the closed one across the hall. Or perhaps the bedroom door is closed for protection against the ghost.

Her mom is a creature of habit, something that was inherited by her brother, but something that skipped her over in the genetic lottery. Sometimes, she wonders how her mother has been able to stand living with her father for so many years. Sometimes, she wonders how they could live without each other.

Because her mom has always been the anchor in their perfect, 1950s-esque family, always the dependable one, who left a stable career to care for her two children and, truth be told, her husband as well, with his mercurial whims and flights of fancy.

Every day, after school, she remembers coming home to her mother greeting her with an elegant-looking snack that she could eat in the kitchen if she was feeling up to it, or take to her room if she wasn't. Once her brother got old enough, he would help, always greeting her with a newly drawn, or painted, or scribbled on piece of artwork.

It took the both of them to balance their father out. It's just a part of his personality to stay up all night on the treadmill only to indulge himself in a four-course breakfast. She remembers waking up in the middle of the night from a bad dream, only to hear the creaking floorboards from his pacing above her head. The creaking floorboards was how she knew she was okay. No monster would get her while her father was awake.

Ironically, it was when her father was asleep when tragedy struck in the form of a drunk driver hitting a moderately stoned freshman outside a party during the summer she was nineteen, about two weeks after the divorce began to appear as a tangible thing that would actually affect them.

The divorce fell through after that, as it became too expensive to pay for their lawyer and her brother's funeral.

Christmas was his favorite holiday, she muses as she realizes--it really was his spark and nothing else that added significance to the holiday. Without him, it might be just another day for her to rest the gaze from burning eyes on the wall across from her, listening to her roommate tossing and turning in her sleep.

It's her first Christmas as an only child in fourteen years, she realizes. Maybe next year, things will be different. Maybe next year, things will be back to normal. But for now--she picks up her phone and sends her mother i don't think so, not this time.

She can picture her mother placing down the phone, maybe with a single tear rolling down her cheek. Her mother goes to bed in her mind's eye, with the strange sense of having never before been so alone.

Funny, isn't it, she laughs as she does the exact same thing.