It Needs a Name

Chapter 4

My panic attack has finally ended. I feel like I've just been through a hurricane. But not the normal kind, not the kind where the screaming winds and painful rain are outside of you. No, this was the kind of hurricane that inside my head. 

It came without a warning, I burst into tears and couldn't regain my composure until well into the night. I was twisting and thrashing around my room, grabbing anything I could and throwing it as hard as I could. My room looks like a disaster. 

My room looks like I feel. 

Broken bits of every imaginable substance scattered around this small space. You can't see where any of the posters and photos used to hang on the walls. You can't tell what the smashed bits of clay used to be, what creatures they once were carefully crafted to resemble.

The past has been swept away by this storm. A graveyard of ideas and ambitions left to rot and gather dust. 

In the wake of this storm, my mind grieves and tries desperately to correct itself, stumbling around and crashing into a bloody heap on the cream carpeting. Black blood spills from my fractured consciousness, Mother will never be able to get the stains out. 

Speaking of Mother, I'm surprised to find out that she didn't hear me raising hell in here. Especially during such a late, ungodly hour. This is suspicious, I must investigate. 

I need something to distract myself from my own ruins anyway. 

I creep down the hallway toward my mother's room, I can remember doing this when I would have nightmares. My mother's bed was always the warm safe place where nothing bad could reach me. Now, my mother was the bad thing, the very monster I was running from. Trying desperately to escape from. 

Ironic how things work out, isn't it?

I get to her door, and push it open slowly, lest anything jump out at me. After making certain that the doorway is booby-trap free, I peek my head in, taking a few moments to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. 

I can make out the Mother-lump under the blankets. I can also see something else, several something elses dropped haphazardly near the side of the bed. Small bottles, glass bottles with logos of some sort of vodka company on them. 

I feel something inside myself snap loose -my lungs maybe, or spinal column. I lean on the door and stare at the bottles, time and space begin to float away.

Reality is being swallowed by the bottles. My mother has become a ship in a bottle. I can see her curled up in the small puddle of alcohol, she looks up at me for a moment before she passes out. Her hair like an angel's, silky and perfect in the liquid.

I slip inside the room, careful not to wake the shell that was once my mother, grab the bottle and dart back into the safety of the hallway. I run back to my bedroom and slam the door. We have to keep the monsters out, I have to keep my mother safe.

I carefully pick my way across the disaster zone, kicking away old memories as I cross. I don't have time to dwell on the past right now, Mother needs me. I lay the bottle down on a shelf carefully, making sure Mother doesn't collide with the glass walls of her prison.  

I flop on my bed, wrapping myself in my blankets nice and tight. I sit and watch my mother in her little bottle. She floats face up and breathes little puffs of glitter out of her nose. 

I wonder how long it will be before she wakes, and what I might feed her when she does.

I still have some fish food left somewhere…