Cold wind, cozy sweaters. Mom is baking the first batch of chocolate chip cookies and I am sneaking into the kitchen to have a taste of the batter whenever she isn't looking. Just as I am about to go for it again, she turns around and grins.
"Well hello to my little cookie batter thief."
I burst into giggles and try to run away but she grabs me and tickles me until I'm almost hiccupping with laughter. She then sits me on the countertop, her warm brown eyes full of life looking at me, "a few more minutes angel, then you can have your cookies."
She then puts on 'take me home, country roads' by john Denver and continues to sing along, dancing around the kitchen when a call interrupts the song. As she listens to the person speaking, her face pales.
"I have to go to hospital, angel. I'll be back soon."
She returns by nightfall when I'm watching TV, my hunger satiated by the cookies. I see her walking towards the door and I know something is off.
"Mama is everything okay?"
"Take a seat Aurora, I have you tell you something." Turns out I'm right because she never calls me Aurora.
"Your father is no more. He suffered a cardiac arrest while traveling back home."
A blur of shock, grief and hurt coats my mind, all too fast for me to process. How could he leave me like that? He was brimming with joy and life until yesterday. I glance up at my mother's vacant brown eyes and wonder, have I lost her too?
I leave the house for a stroll in the park because I was suffocating inside. Yesterday's disaster of a conversation is playing in mind on a loop when I see a young mom play with her 5-year-old.
The fractured part of me shatters looking at the way she's laughing with the child and I break into a sprint, just to escape from this mess of my head. It isn't until I hear a loud honk that I stop.
And then I see it, the truck speeding towards me. And despite the rational part of my mind screaming at me to get out of its way, I stay frozen in my tracks, not with fear but absolute peace in my mind, as if this I exactly where I'm meant to be. I realize this is my ultimate escape, my freedom from this curse.
And then I'm swallowed into the oblivion.
YOU ARE READING
The chaos of mending hearts
Short StoryAurora doesn't know how to live anymore, all her dreams and joy buried beneath the hatred of her mom. But what will happen, when she finally finds the courage to speak up to her ever-furious mother? will it be for the better or for the worse?
