A Slow, Painful Death

By Georgia Trites, Grade 9

As soon as my eyes opened and took in a room I didn’t recognize, I knew there was something very wrong.

The trees outside, barely visible through a window set high on a wall, reminded me of my mother. Winter’s chill had robbed them of their leaves, and now their branches were left grasping at a pale blue sky that would never give it anything in return for its devotion. My mother never stopped reaching for me, even after I moved thousands of miles away from her ranch, away from its dilapidated yellow wooden beams. The mere thought of her brought memories of late nights, sweaty palms, and that all-too-familiar tight feeling in my chest. Living in her home was a slow, painful death. Even so, I missed her. Without her, I was an old piano, cursed with a broken key. There was something, deftly hidden inside my bones, that stopped me from playing the right notes each time I tried.

The room I was in was unsettling in its mystery, but something told me I had been there before. A rocking chair, covered in a faded butterscotch floral pattern, sat in the corner. Its vaguely familiar scent wrapped itself around me, a sickeningly sweet perfume.

Across the room from me, I saw my mother. She looked the way she always used to: her skin covered with a thin layer of sweat that stuck her hair to her face, her clothes coated in grime from years of use, and her eyes looking above me into nothingness. In a room designed to be comforting, she was mould crawling on the ceiling, ready to overtake anything beautiful. She took a step towards me, and I felt her hand gently caress the side of my face.

“I always knew you’d come back.” Her voice trembled with the strain of saying those six words, and then her lips sealed.

She reached out to me, and her nails dug into my skin when I reluctantly took her hand. Together, we walked out of the room and down a corridor, its walls padded with dirty aureolin-coloured fabric. All of a sudden, she stopped. We were in front of a door, covered in what looked like a new coat of paint, its hinges dangerously close to falling off. My mother’s lips parted once again.

“Open it.”

“No. My whole life, I’ve dropped everything to do whatever you want. I’m done with following your rules.” I had to stand up to her. Something within me was ready to break, even as the rational parts of my mind begged me to walk away.

Her face twisted into a grimace, but when she let out a cry of pain, the piercing noise stopped almost as soon as it began. Her mouth gaped open, leaving her caught in her desperate attempt to scream that would never reach fruition. Blood coursed down her face, tracing highways of red along her cheeks.

My breath quickened, and I felt panic steadily infecting what remained of my mind. I had to get out.

I turned, and before she could try to stop me, I began to run. My feet played a steady rhythm on the carpeted floor, but all of a sudden I felt a weight pressing down on my right leg. It was her, holding on to my ankle, a twisted grin spread across her face. No matter how much I ran, she’d be with me, tormenting my every waking second. She stood and began to whisper, cruelly reminding me of things I wanted so desperately to forget.

There was no escaping her.

But maybe, I could get her away from me. In two seconds of heat, of overpowering rage and fear, there was a knife, a sharp scream, and then nothing. My mother lay in a heap of skin, bones, and blood. She was gone.

The next breath I took, I was back in the quaint familiarity of my bedroom. I had looked over all of it so many times: the gauzy curtains that flanked the windows, the faded beige bedsheet, the rusty white fan that sat next to the bed. Usually, I don’t remember my dreams, and if I do, I can only grasp vague details before all memory of the dream slips away. Even so, I couldn’t forget the dream I had just woken up from or the sense of dread that shadowed it.

The dream was about my mother. I suppose I still haven’t rid myself of her hold on me, even after how long she’s been dead.

To be fair, my mother was my world for the most formative years of my life, so it’s perfectly normal that her thoughts and desires still impact all my actions. Right? It has to be.

My whole life, I’ve worked so hard towards normalcy. I want nothing more than to be that neighbour whose house sits quietly at the end of the block, the one you’ll see watering their garden and think: “what a perfectly, wonderfully normal member of the community”.

Ophelia will want to know about my dream. They’ve been studying psychology for just over two years now, and so they’re up to date on new technologies that wealthy researchers claim will cure all of the world’s issues.

I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on my nightstand. Peculiarly, the nightstand was now emblazoned with the same butterscotch floral pattern that covered the chair in my dream. I chose not to give it too much thought, and as I drank the water I poured for myself, I made a promise. Today, I would work up the courage to see Ophelia – it would be good for me.

After hastily throwing on a coat, I began the five-block walk to Ophelia’s place. Strangely enough, the smell from my dream, sickeningly sweet as ever, seemed to be laced into the very air I was breathing. Quickening my pace, I eventually found myself looking up at what should be the brick exterior of Ophelia’s apartment building. Instead, I was looking at the same dirty aureolin fabric that covered the walls of the corridor in my dream. Could they have just installed it?

I took a deep breath and called them. After a few seconds, they picked up, and I immediately began to recite the script for the conversation I had carefully created in my head. “Ophelia? Hi. I’m outside your building, would you want to meet me out here and we could go out for brunch?”

At first, there was no reply. Soon though, Ophelia’s voice began to whisper the words my mother had said in my dream. “I always knew you’d come back.”
Slowly, every pedestrian, resident, and passer-by turned their head towards me. In a chorus of voices, high and low, old and young, melodious and grating, they repeated the same words. “I always knew you’d come back.”

The reality of where I truly was dawned on me in fragments. I was still there in the narrow corridor, with the door whose hinges were ready to break, the dirty aureolin padding, and my mother, next to me, seemingly ecstatic at my fear.

There was no escaping her.