Family Matters

Chapter One

"I had everything...everything! And I lost it all...because of you! If I had never found out that I was pregnant, I-I never...." I watched Mama silently while gripping the old stuffed turtle that has come to be my lifelong friend.

She was doing it again. Drowning herself in alcohol that she couldn't even afford yet she still bought it. I didn't know what I was feeling as I watched Mama take another huge gulp from the beer bottle in her hand. Several other ones she had emptied previously laid around her in a circle as she sat on the floor in the kitchen.

I was tempted to leave and go back into my room, but the other side of me didn't want to. I wanted to make sure that she got to bed alright without falling or hurting herself in the process. I knew she was upset, she was upset at the life she previously had but threw away for someone she thought she loved.

She always cried about it and had one night drunkenly explained some of it to me.

Mama was previously married to someone but she didn't love the man. It was an arranged marriage between the two but my mother had fallen in love with another man and had decided to leave her husband for the man she thought she loved.

I don't know what happened after that but it was all she said before passing out on the couch.

"I-I can't...I just..." Mama's incoherent grumbles grabbed my attention and my eyes fluttered to her form as she stood up shakily, with the beer bottle in hand but upside down. The contents of the bottle spilled onto the floor as she walked over to the counter.

She used her right hand to keep herself up and dropped the beer bottle in her left, the glass shattering upon contact with the floor.

Her hand reached over for something and I didn't know what it was but I soon found out as my eyes widened as in her hand was now a knife.

"M-Mama...?" I muttered wearily and she glared at me while pointing the knife at me.

"Shut up! This is your fault! Everything is your fault! E-Even this...this too" Mama had turned the knife point away from me and towards herself before driving it into her stomach. My eyes widened as I stood their frozen.

Mama fell to the ground in a heap with the knife still lodged in her stomach and blood began to trickle out the corner of her lips.

"You did this to me you know? He wouldn't have left me...I'm sure he wouldn't have" Her words trailed off as she started breaking into a blood filled cough.

All the while, I had stood there frozen, my stuffed turtle had long fallen out of my arms. I didn't know why I couldn't move, or say anything. I wanted to help Mama, I know she needed to get to a hospital, but I was just frozen.

Her eyes held such coldness as they gazed upon me. There was nothing in them. No more sadness, anger, loneliness, resentment, regret. None of it because it had all flooded from her as the life drained out of her body and spilled onto the kitchen floor.

As I stood there that day, I had come to the realization that Mama was never really my Mama. I had just called her that because I wanted it to feel like I had a Mama since I didn't have a Papa.

But now I had no one.

"Ceres?"

My eyes turned up at the sound of my voice being called and I saw one of the police officers who had come to my house to help me. His name was Officer Waters, and he had been with me the entire process as they investigated everything that was happening.