MOMMY ISSUES | Tamber

32

Piercing afternoon sunlight filters through the lavish bay window overlooking the expansive back garden. Errant dust motes dance in the gilded beams crisscrossing the plush Persian rug adorning the polished parquet floors.

At the far end of the cavernous living space, Amber stands rigidly poised before the ornate marble hearth - flawless posture and flint-eyed focus concealing churning inner tumult. One finely sculpted hand unconsciously worries the delicate links of her diamond tennis bracelet in a fitful, almost compulsive gesture.

The reigning silence is rent asunder by the approaching staccato of heels striking hardwood from the adjacent hallway. With impeccable dramatic timing, Sam sweeps into the room - every line of her willowy frame exuding disdainful arrogance in palpable contrails.

She pauses mid-stride, one sleekly arched brow quirking ever-so-slightly upon registering Amber's roiling presence like a solar flare scorching the far horizon. But then her mouth purses into its trademark moue of aristocratic dismissiveness as she promptly resumes her unhurried, leonine advance.

"To what do I owe this unexpected summoning, Amber?" Sam questioned, "As loath as I am to remind you, our revised scheduling agreement assures me sanctuary from your...taxing drama until after the cotillion."

She breezes to within several feet of where Amber stands, pausing once more to slowly revolve as if inspecting the room's opulent furnishings with a discerning collector's eye.

All through her casually dismissive revolutions, Amber remains conspicuously mute and implacably frozen - every centimeter of her coiled positioning suggesting a pressure-cooker nearing its bursting point. Just as it seems unbearable tensions must boil over, she turns at last to affix Samantha with a look whose intensity causes the elder Westin to visibly falter in turn.

"She's self-mutilating, Sam." Amber informs, "Did you know?"

The words seem to detonate in the humid space between them with the force of a cluster bomb - sucking all residual oxygen from Samantha's lungs in a visceral whoosh.

Her serpentine eyes widen incrementally at the lancing revelation, and for an instant, the blistering rictus of her regal mask feels as though it may melt away completely. Yet just as abruptly, the glacial front reasserts itself - aristocratic disdain quickly superseding any telltale flickers of shock or distress.

"Good God, you can't be serious." Sam looked so worried for her younger sister. Scared even.

But Amber doesn't so much as acknowledge the immediate backhanded dismissal. She simply continues boring into her mother with that same fulminating, depthless stare - every ounce of coiled tension betraying the yawning abyss of disquieting truths lurking just beneath.

"She very nearly succeeded this morning, you see." Amber snitched, "Had the showers not revealed her...exertions just in time. I'm amazed you failed to notice the full pathology steadily unraveling beneath our very roof."

At that, any remaining vestiges of Samantha's urbane mask seem to fracture like a poorly forged blade against tempered steel. Her svelte neck tendons strain visibly as a series of discordant expressions war across her marble features: confusion, disgust, undisguised revulsion flickering in sequence before her countenance returns to its default sneer of viperous aristocratic disdain.

"I'll thank you to curb that vulgar tongue in my presence, Amber." Sam warned, "Especially where that...unfortunate creature is involved. Now kindly cut to whatever sordid piece of drama this is all preamble for. I was in the midst of scheduling--" 

"Cut to it?" It's Amber who interjects at last - her voice shifting from tightly leashed fury to something far more insidious with those two sibilantly charged syllables. She advances a step closer until the indecently intimate proximity forces Samantha to rear back infinitesimally.

Then.

Amber slowly extends her arm until her palm faces upwards in a queenly beckoning - slender fingers pausing in elegant, accusatory extension. There, cradled in the porcelain cradle of her alabaster skin, several undulating slashes of unfurled flesh and glistening crimson trench the delicate underside of her wrist.

The wounds appear fresh - seething and swollen where the sharpened bone of Amber's arm frames the lurid stigmata in gruesome bas-relief. Like the unholy melding of flayed musculature and obsidian-faceted rubies, they pulse with visceral, unmistakable accusation against all reason and decorum.

If the iconography alone weren't enough to lance through the barrier of Samantha's imperturbable froideur, then the look accompanying Amber's next toneless words would succeed in salting any remaining wounds.

"Does this offend your sensibilities enough for you, Sam? Or are you so utterly adrift within your own sociopathic privilege that my wife's psychotic devolution no longer even manages to rate notice?" Amber questions her sister in law.

For several pulses more, Samantha can only stare in mute, sickened revulsion at the grisly tableau Amber has lacerated mercilessly across the space between them. Her trachea vibrates with increasingly shallow, ragged gasps as she struggles to process the cataclysmic violation of everything they hold sacrosanct.

But then Amber's revelation has sundered the final vestige of their social graces and restraint utterly. With a strangled, leonine snarl, the lines of conditioned aristocracy bleed away in a wash of visceral disgust. The old dragon rears upright--exposed fangs at last unsheathed and glistening.

"What kind of demented...perversion is this?" Sam hissed, "How DARE you defile our presences with such vile, ATTENTION-SEEKING blasph--"

But she gets no further before Amber seizes her by both shoulders and slams her bodily into the wall of frosted glass shelving against which she'd been poised. Overhead, a terra cotta funerary mask from their collection of antiquities tumbles free shattering apart against the hardwood a hairsbreadth from where Samantha's stockinged heels now dangle, useless. She remains pinned by Amber's flexed, vise-like grip, lips peeled back in a grimace of outraged shock.

"Do not dare lecture me on decorum or profane attention, you hateful crone. Not when the woman you insisted become your daughter-by-law now resorts to flaying herself in mute, uncomprehending torment." Amber reminded her. "But then...why should you find that the slightest bit remarkable, hmm? My beautiful Tara has clearly learned well from her family's doyennes just how to self-destruct in perfect, blue-blooded silence."

Samantha instinctively recoils at the unerring taunt behind Amber's words, the move allowing just enough slack for Amber to tighten her vise-like clutch enough to lift her sister-in-law clear off her feet.

Now it's Amber's turn to loom over the struggle, eclipsing Samantha in a towering study of feral, exquisite menace. Their faces are separated only by the yawning abyss between two razor-toothed apex predators vying for total dominance of the pride.

Yet when Amber speaks next, it's in a deceivingly hushed, poisonously placid series of intonations that cut straighter to Samantha's black, atrophied core than any screamed invective or violence. "So you'll forgive me if I decline extending you the slightest...modicum of deference just now, Mother. Not when such depravities are being committed right beneath."

when i say daughter by law i mean sam literaly kinda wanted to adopt tara so..