Odelia awoke with a start, her eyes snapping open to find the ceiling fixture once again lit, and Melanie snoring softly beside her.
At some point during the night, she had gotten up and relit her 'stage,' afterwards posing herself in the exact same position she'd fallen in during her pretend collapse the night before, complete with the high heels she'd been too emotionally exhausted to kick off. It was insulting, the absurd sight of those stiletto heels poking into the air. How stupid did the woman think Odelia was?
Thanks to the drawn black-out blinds and the unset clock on the DVD player, Odelia had no way to be sure of the time, but judging by how groggy she remained, it was barely dawn. She yawned. What had she been dreaming...? It was a good one, she remembered that much. Something sunlit...
She looked up at the glaring light bulb. Of course she'd dreamed of the sun.
So sunlight, and... what else? She strained to remember, but couldn't. Only the start of the dream had been lucid, because she'd been too tired to sustain such a shallow sleep state, and ordinary dreams were harder to recall than consciously directed ones. They shattered upon impact with the waking world.
Like that pop bottle at the fair, remember?
The fragments of this one's shattering still existed, because they were still flitting in and out of her thoughts, so if she watched for them, she ought to be able to catch a few, and maybe (long grass, rippling in the breeze) accumulate enough to reconstitute the—
"Good morning," Melanie said, pushing herself up into a kneeling position.
The night had robbed her appearance of its pathetic qualities. Most of her make-up had rubbed off on the floor and what was left was so smudged that the tear tracks had been erased. In addition, her hair was no longer merely unkempt as if she had been running anxious fingers through it, but a hairspray-stiffened wad of snarls.
(tag, we were playing tag)
Odelia thought she looked like a zombie raccoon wearing a ball of barbed wire as a hat.
The zombie raccoon spoke again, in the tones of a victim of great tragedy who was too polite and dignified to give vent and scream in anguish. "Shouldn't you be getting the children up for school and giving them breakfast? Oh!" she slapped her forehead, "that's right; I'm the one who does those things now that you're... 'incapacitated.' I'd forgotten for a moment! Why, if I wasn't here, nothing would ever—"
"Jackson is easily as capable as you, and he can't be any lazier or more irresponsible." (they'd been jumping off of one thing and onto another, but what had those things been...?) "And should he somehow prove to be even worse at taking care of your children than you are, I'll teach them how to fend for themselves. So don't trouble yourself on that account, Melanie. You may pack your bags secure in the knowledge that we'll all be better off without you." (was it furniture of some kind?)
Melanie hiked her skirt up high enough to move her legs independently, so she could clamber to her feet. As soon as she was standing, she wriggled it back into place. "So that's how you feel, is it? After all I've done for you?"
With a gasp, Odelia opened her mouth to reply and a laugh ripped out instead. The sound startled her into another, harder gust of laughter. And then another...
And yet another!
She couldn't stop for the life of her. Each time a laughing fit dwindled down to a sigh, she recalled the phrase "after all I've done for you," and a new one took hold. Melanie was still talking, but Odelia couldn't hear a word of it as she laughed, and laughed, and laughed...
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
