Sleeping With the Preachers Daughter

Mother Issues

"Mom... Mom. Mama! Get up! Get up please!" Onika quickly rushed to her mothers side.

She could hardly tell if she was conscious or not. The door to their apartment was cracked and the lights were off when she entered.

The gleam of the faint moonlight had provided Onika with enough illumination to make out Carol laying on the floor of their grimy living room.

"Mom talk to me!" She pleaded pulling her head into her lap.

Anxiously she tapped on her cheeks, to which finally provoked a response as she twisted her head weakly from side to side, grumbling something incoherent.

Onika's quivering lips released a breath of relief knowing that her mother was still breathing. But if something wasn't done soon there was no telling how long she would continue to do so.

Quickly, yet gently she placed Carols head back on the floor before going for the kitchen light. Her antsy fingers felt for, then flipped the switch, hearing the little click, but no sound. She ran her hand over the switch a few more times praying the first one had been a mistake... but to no avail.

The electricity was cut off.

Her fist balled as her forehead pressed against the cool wall. She felt a knot in her throat as anxiety tinkered with her mental state. Her bones feeling nimble like her legs could give out at any moment.

What the hell was she going to do? Who would she call?

She made her way back over to her hardly conscious mother.

"Mom what did you take. What did you do." She questioned trying to keep her shaky voice as even as possible.

"I... I-don... just lemme sleep Nika I- I nee. Needa rest..."

"No you fucking don't! You're going to die dammit!" She screamed as heat flushed her cheeks and tears brimmed her eyes.

"Just- just get up! Please just get up! Don't make me call them!" Onika threatened.

But she felt hopeless, like she was yelling down a dark, vacant hall waiting for a response that would never come. Her mother was no longer there for her. Onika was alone with a hysterical woman she hardly recognized. Someone she had seen as her mother just a few days ago... or maybe more like a few days out of the week, because this had become routine now.

Every so often this stranger took residence in her mothers body in a hazy overdose, and Onika wished she could pretend it wasn't her... but it was starting to seem more realistic to believe that it was her, than to hold onto the fading memory of her once well mother.

Hesitantly she pulled her phone from her pocket.

She didn't want to do it, Onika badly hoped that her mother would sit up in just enough time to stop her and say that it was going to be ok, that it was going to get better, that she was going to do better for her.

But reality hit allot harder than that fantasy as the number for the police dialed brightly on her phone.

"Queens New York, what's you're emergency?" She heard a feminine voice.

"I... I'm... my mother is umm." She tried to speak, but the words just couldn't come out. They were lodged in the back of her throat threatening to come out as tears instead.

"Ma'am please breath and speak to me, it's alright."

"She's on drugs and I-I can't she, she umm, she won't m-move."

"Is she conscious?"

"Umm yes, yes but I- I don't know what to do." She shook her head frantically.