A Color With Love

Chapter 1

It all started after the death of my mother. That's how normal sob stories start isn't it. Well, mine wasn't much of a loss, she was a bitch anyway. To get into the more finer details, she was an alcoholic and never treated me right. I mean, what kind of mother locks herself in her room all day, drinking a Jaeger and eating stale Potato chips? She was a mess. Forchanitly, for her, she had me at fifthteen. So she raised me to know how to follow the rules under strict consequences if I did thetask Incorrectly.

My Routine Tasks Were:

- "Get me a beer!"

- "Clean this shit up!"

- "Be a good little girl, and leave me the fuck alone!" Which I would gladly do.

Consequences If Task Was Not Done Correctly:

- A slap in the face if the "Beer-Fizz" was spilt. This was almost always the case considering the trembling of my hands.

- A yank of my hair if I missed a bottle or pepperoni was dropped.

- A punch in the gut if I didn't leave when requested. Only rarely did I miss the chance to hear that.

Her name was Megan Martez and she was no mother to me. She would often speak of her highschool sweetheart, Franklin Arnoldson, my father. She'd say, "You look just like your father, and he was ugly." Those snide comments didn't hurt as much as watching her take that final swig and pass out, snores and all.

Like I said, she was no mother to me. I don't think she ever really cared about me. Not one word of kindness left her lips; just a bitter acknowledgment that she does indeed have a daughter.

I have this edgy feeling that something happened to her. Something that got her to the point in life where one drink was never enough. But what? I used to ask myself these questions often. But then I'd always snap out of it, back to my reality.

There's a certain bittersweet love that stabs the soul. One kind of love that is both disturbing and irrational in the eyes of a logical mind.

My father, who I had never met, died the night after my mother ever so kindly informed him of her pregnancy with me. And no, his death was no accident. Over-dosing on ecstasy, all because of a broken condom and "Financial Stress." Yeah, sure it was. I mean, I believe the broken condom part, but let's all admit it here, who'd want to keep a kid because things got a bit frisky at a party? Who'd want to keep me? I wasn't worth her nine months of hell just so I could serve her with a bottle of brandy. Oh, no I wasn't.

One night, my mother had drank too much to care that I sat next to her as long as I kept my trap shut. In a sense, it was like a family dinner with ordered-in pizza, and my mother belching her way through another night.

We had already watched two episodes of The Simpsons, when I knew it was around that time she would pass out pathetically drunk again. I didn't really notice that she'd had almost twice the amount to drink tonight than usual. However, I did notice it when she croaked, "You know, y-your daddy was a...a prick for abandoning me. And you should know he killed h-himself because he didn't want to deal with a b-bitch like you."

She glared daggers into my eyes, until her breathing slowed and her head fell back, onto her pillow, with a kind of finality that could only be the sound of a fair dismissal. Little did I know that when I walked out of that room that night, that she would never awake. I would never had imagined those to be the last words my mother would say to me.