Broken Mothers

The kitchen was quiet. The narrow, gloomy room had cooled, leaving it in the dim shade of evening.

She was still caught in the awkward stage between girl and adolescent. Long limbs and more height every day, fuller features and longer hair. The eyes remained large and cow-like, watching tasks that seemed to be done by someone else's hands with a sad resonance. Time passed and nothing changed.

She didn't see the overweight woman standing in the doorway. The shock of carrot coloured curls that defied gravity didn't alert her. Only when the humanoid walrus shuffled down the steps with staggered slowness did she turn.

A moment of recognition between a damaged woman and her damaged daughter.

"I always knew I'd have to share him."

Jocelyn van Reinhardt had a voice that sounded as though she was consistently trying to swallow cake. Some remnant of a face not too dissimilar to her daughter's remained, framed by years of rich food's results.

"But I never thought my competition would be my own daughter."

Morgance dried her hands with a kitchen towel and kept her eyes down.

"You don't even deny it."

"What would you like me to deny, mother?" Morgance asked, her tone far too weary for a girl of sixteen.

"Nothing," Jocelyn answered. "It'd be a lie. You can't deny he has you. You can't deny you enjoy it. You can't deny that you pile everything you can into my food to make me like this. So he won't want me. So he'll come to you."

"I have nothing to do with your weight, mother," Morgance answered, voice still even and unstirred by Jocelyn's pointed accusations. "I cook what you ask me to cook. I always have. How much of it you eat is your own concern."

"I see! So it's my fault, is it, that I'm like this, when I have nothing to do with my own food!"

Morgance patiently folded the towel and put it back in its proper place. "If you eat too much of even the healthiest food, mother, you'll put on weight. It's portion as well as content. I put the right amount on your plate. It's not my fault if you raid my coolroom afterwards."

"Raid your coolroom?" Jocelyn hissed. "Don't be so damn brassy! You own nothing here!"

"No one else in this house can cook," Morgance responded coolly. "When I'm the only one using it, I'll call it mine as I like."

Jocelyn's temper snapped like a biscuit between her fingers. Her first two strikes took her daughter by surprise; one across her cheek, another upwards to her jaw. Flabby hands whacked out at whatever they could reach, until they grasped Morgance's shoulders and whirled. She threw her daughter violently onto the stone floor, and began to take her muffin-topped shoes to her torso. She punctuated the end of each sentence with a solid outward lash.

"You little whore!" she shrieked. "It's my house! He's my husband! It's my food! It's my body! Get up! Get up!"

But Morgance didn't get up. She had no intention of fighting back. She laid on the kitchen floor and stared at the movement of her mother's ankles. She barely felt it. She could feel cold stone against the cut on her cheekbone, but the rest turned to a distant, dull repetition that shook her senses and rumbled through her world. The words turned to unintelligible gibberish.

And then up it came. Searing upwards from her abdomen, it shattered through her foggy mind and drew a keen sob of pain out of her. Something warm and wet pooled beneath her, and she was sure, for a moment, that her mother had taken a knife to her.

She hadn't. Her mother stared at the blood she'd kicked from her daughter's stomach, watched as it fled and left glaring stains from the hips down. She stood in horror for a moment, and then turned to snatch the meat cleaver from its metal hook.

"You bitch!" She howled, hastening back to the spot where her daughter lay so quickly that she fell over, landing with a quasi-splat on the floor. "How dare you! How could you! I give him children! You don't! You never will!"

She began to haul herself across the floor, using the cleaver's edge and the floor's slab grooves to drag herself forwards. Morgance spent half a moment perplexed - what was she talking about? What children? What child had she ever carried?

But there were more pressing matters. Morgance rolled and began to crawl for the door, one hand against numerous cracked ribs. Her mother slipped on the patch of blood and clonked her jaw on the lower kitchen step.

Heavy footsteps thundered through the next room, and Morgance recognised her father's boots and her brother's small, chubby legs as they approached.

"What in the Hell!" Lord van Reinhardt bellowed, bending to take hold of his daughter's shoulders. "What the fuck did you do, Jocelyn! You mad bitch, what the fuck did you do?"

The fat old man hauled his blood covered daughter from the floor, getting her settled into a cradle between his arms before he turned from his wife. Jocelyn screeched as he did so, and began enraged, hysterical weeping. She continued to rage at the door even after they had gone, until she collapsed back into the red stain left by her destroyed grandchild.

Morgance lay catatonic and limp in her father's arms as he waddle-rushed down the corridors. Somewhere, she took comfort.

Daddy will always come for you.