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SATURDAY MORNING used to be one of Valentina's favorite times of the week. She'd be woken up by the sweet scent of chocolate chip pancakes, followed by a blustering singe to her nostrils when Alicia inevitably burnt them—every time without fail.
But that tradition had long passed, along with Valentina's childhood and all the mornings where she was woken up by her mother. The only times the older woman appeared in the younger's mornings were when she was just leaving for work, or in Valentina's brisk dreams in which everything was back to how it used to be.
This morning was like the last, where Valentina awoke with a sudden gasp and a t-shirt drenched in sweat. Often times, the girl's nights were filled with cycling terrors that played through her sleeping mind like a horror movie on repeat. She never fully rested, just stepped outside of her body for the night.
Last night, it wasn't the usual claw of a Demogorgon or the spikes of a bear trap that intercepted her senseless state. It was the unusually cold touch of her mother's loving hand, but gone was the warm feeling of a mom's touch. It was like razor blades pricking Valentina's skin, stabbing her awake. It was her mom's cold, dead body laying burden onto her daughter.
The moment Valentina's blue eyes widened and caught sight of the blank wall in front of her, an exasperated sigh left her cracked lips. Alicia Varner was not standing in front of her daughter, with an expression so dull and empty that it resembled something so horrifically uniform to that of the undead. It was just the gray walls of her bedroom, that used to be splattered with music and space themed posters and pinned pictures of childhood memories. Those glories were stored in a shoebox at the bottom of the mess that is Valentina's closet, buried beneath several other shoeboxes that she pretended were just foot-accessories. Valentina did not see her childhood bedroom when she awoke, nor did she see her mother's ghastly, decaying form.
Wiping her slick forehead clear of the wet strands of hair that stuck to it, Valentina forced her lungs to intake large breaths of air for a few minutes until she calmed down enough to stand up. Her legs were shaky as they hit the ground, and the weakness didn't pass until she was leaning over the toilet, watching her medications swish around the toilet bowl while an opioid swished around her mouth.
She placed her left hand on the toilet seat—something she would've thought was disgusting if her head wasn't so spaced out at the moment—and leaned down to watch the little, round tablet sink into the drain. She wondered where all the pills she had flushed ended up, if they were piling somewhere in the sewers? Being eaten by some disturbing animal that she didn't want to ever come across? Or were they still in the toilet, just out of sight from the girl, and waiting for their moment to come back and force their way down her throat like they'd forced a home in her brain. Whether Valentina would ever admit it to herself or not, she felt incredibly guilty every time she watched that medication swirl in the mucky toilet water. But that feeling was flushed away like the more favorable kind of pill spilt its effects into her body.
