The Musings of a Teenage Something

A Cut to the Neck: Short Story

Originally written for my other story, an untitled sequel to I'm Not Dead that I hadn't quite gotten to work in. 

I look at the TV. The news station is playing another clip form the latest abortion rally. The country is still fighting the Pro-Choice/Pro-Life issue. I am Pro-Choice. But don't hate me for it. Mom is cutting up vegetables in the kitchen, glancing at the TV over the bar. I wish she wasn't watching. She might see my face among the crowd and discover I wasn't at school.

"I didn't want you." She reminds me.

Her words no longer hurt. She used to whisper them in my ear, tucking me in at night. Not when I was super little, when I was at least eight. Old enough to understand what she meant, and old enough for the words to hurt. She never said the words around Dad, I noticed. So I started to ask them both to tuck me in. Dad would sat he loves me, and mom would remain silent.

This kept up, her silence, until Dad decided that I was too old to be tucked in. We had a dog at that point, and the dog slept with me. Mom hated that dog. One day, driving me home from a baseball game Dad couldn't make it to, she said, "I love that dog more than I'll ever love you."

That's what she would say. Either something about how she didn't love me, or how she didn't want me.

She looks back up at the TV now, and mumbles about how if abortion was legal, people like me wouldn't exist.

But like I said, her words don't hurt.

"Dad," I say one morning. Mom's in the other room, and Dad is shaving. "Mom doesn't love me."

He nicks his neck, right at his Adam's apple. A small dribble of blood goes down his neck and he dabs a towel at it. "Why would you think something like that?" He asks.

"Because she tells me so. But she never says it with you in the room."

I look in the mirror with Dad. He's washed the excess shaving cream off, and right now, we look incredibly similar. "I know she doesn't. She never has."

"What do you mean?"

Dad's neck is still bleeding and he presses the towel at it again. "She didn't love you from day one."