Mother is life.
Mother is love.
Mother is the reason I am still alive.
Mother is kindness,
Mother is concern;
Mother is the reason we do not starve to death.
You see, Mother takes care of us. Mother feeds us, cleans us, and sometimes she’ll even sing us a lullaby. Mother is very nice; I like her.
Everyone in the house likes Mother, but that might just be because anyone who doesn’t disappears as soon as they admit it. I don’t know why anyone would dislike Mother. Especially when she is the reason we are still alive. Mother runs the house at the end of our street. House Tralnood, we are called. The neighbors will say that Mother is evil.
They are still alive.
Little Emilia said she didn’t like Mother’s cobblestone soup.
She is no longer with us.
Mother is our real mother. We do not have real fathers, Mother says. We do not need real fathers, not when we have Mother. The neighbors’ kids will laugh at us for being orphans.
They are still alive.
Little Barty threw a tantrum last week, crying for his ‘mama’. Bartholomew- Barty, as we’d called him- was new to the house. He had managed two nights before the grief of losing both his parents to an armed burglary caught up to him. Mother approached him calmly, kneeling down to give the toddler a kiss. She wiped the tears from his face, her bare-boned fingers doing little to soothe him.
“I am your Mother,” She’d said, rubbing circles on Barty’s back. “I am right here, my love.”
“No!” Barty had screamed, recoiling from her venomous touch. His face had begun to droop, the rot coursing through his veins causing them to appear black beneath his chalky skin. “I want my real mother! I want my- !”
Barty is no longer with us.
Mother is a little scary. She has empty, black pits where her eyes should be, and sometimes a loose maggot will fall out of the hole in the back of her skull. Her hair is plastered onto the bone with tree sap, matted with a putrid blend of flesh, blood and glue. Mother is always smiling; her teeth are stuck that way, all sixteen of them.
Smiling is good, Mother says. She told Emilia to smile as her father dropped her off in a ditch, bruised and battered and dead. She told Barty to smile as the thieves dropped him off in a bush behind his house, stabbed and bleeding and dead.
She told me to smile as a much younger, more beautiful version of herself dropped me off in our fireplace, beaten and charred and dead.
I was mortified, of course, until I caught a glimpse of her stepping into the flames with me. For the brief moment that I lay there, watching the heat eat at her skin, my lips curved upward in a smile. Mother would never leave me alone.