MALUM

Chapter 6

Kyle opened his eyes to find himself asleep on his twin-sized bed. His room, being in all sorts of disarray, looked more akin to what a teenager's room would look like. But Kyle, being the twenty-three-year-old man, was more of a child at heart. He was the responsible type but wreckless in other areas. One of them being clean and keeping up with household chores. Grabbing his phone from a worn makeshift side table next to his bed, he unlocked the phone to see his notifications and check the time. "10:22 am," read the top of his phone as he set it down and rubbed his eyes. Gazing at the ceiling, he knew he had to get up. Remember how it was established that Kyle was wreakless with some things in his life? Sleep patterns were another one of his bad habits. What was worse was the fact that he was supposed to be taking care of his sick mother. His father, having passed away from lung cancer, left all the work of taking care of his ill mother, who had early-onset dementia. Kyle had been a very late pregnancy when his parents conceived him. It had been the perfect recipe of one party refusing to get their tubes tied, another party delaying getting the long dreaded vasectomy, and one night after one of those "fancy little date nights" older couples have to try and spice things up. It would be an outright lie to say that Kyle wasn't an accidental baby but an accident that had been well-loved all the way. Having Kyle was a challenge as well. His mother, being a small, petite woman as well as being older, had multiple risk factors for having kids at her age. She had been forty-four when she had him.

At sixty-seven, his mother had been an absolute handful to care for. To make matters worse, it was all he had known in his twenties, which would explain why he was a child at heart. For the last three years of his life, since Kyle turned twenty, he had watched his mom's health and mind decay from within for three years on going. It had gotten wrong, too. Bad enough to the point where Kyle's mental health declined as well. He was often living off of an unhealthy concoction of energy drinks and fast food. He hadn't even been sleeping all that well. He would find himself scrolling social media for long hours of the night and trying to get his mother to sleep, which had been a different story altogether. His mother had grown more and more violent over the years. Trying anything he could do to calm her down. Living off of the government assistance he was receiving to take care of her, he couldn't even afford to even think about putting her in assisted living. So, his last and final alternative would be putting her in a state-run care facility. The thought made Kyle almost want to vomit in his mouth. Putting her in a home was nearly the exact equivalent of him walking up and placing a round or two into her head. A death sentence would have put it lightly. Even with her being as sick as she was, he couldn't pull the trigger. That said, seeing her unravel like she did almost broke him. What started with a simple slip of the memory, her symptoms seemed so mild to everyone, including Kyle. Then, like the great Hindenburg that crashed and busted into flames, so did her health. Doctors and the like recognized the symptoms but did what little they could do to ease her pain and suffering. For unknown reasons, her sleep meds seemed to stop working as well as they did at the beginning. Night terrors flooded her mind like a plague. A parasite that fed on her inner psyche and laughed in the faces of everyone around her. Once the night terrors became a regular occurrence, her memory began to leak into the unknown, never to be seen again. She had gotten to the point where she would forget things and events that had just happened a few hours prior. She would remember, laugh it off, and move on. However, it wouldn't be too long before her memory would lose her almost entirely. Waking up and forgetting where she was, she would get violent as Kyle would remind her what was happening. All for the cycle to repeat itself over and over again. While others his age were out partying, getting drunk, and having the time of their lives, he was confined to a small apartment in which turned into Kyle's prison. That was when he first noticed a deep-seated hatred that he tried to reject. Guilt flooded his inner being as he played coy to what was happening. Without even realizing what was happening, he had grown a hatred for her. It was a disgusting thought, and he hated himself feeling that way and denying it as much as he could. It had been the sickness that she had that turned him as bitter as he was. He loved his mother more than the world, which is what pained him so much to feel the anger and resentment he had felt in his heart.