Mommy's Little Monsters

The Little Darlings

Mother was angry. She was yelling at the doctor. They wished that she wouldn’t do that. They were quite fond of the doctor and they never liked it when Mother yelled. She was yelling awfully loud too, for they could hear Mother all the way downstairs.

“Why is Mother angry?” Glover stood at the bottom of the stairs listening the voices.

August looked up from his book. “I think Dr. Sawbones killed the wrong person,” he answered.

“How do you kill the wrong person?” Glover asked his brother.

August shrugged. “Mother said it was someone important and now they may come after us.”

“Are we going to have to move again?”
August did not look up from his reading again. “I don’t know. Mother will tell us.”

“Where will we go?”

“Who says we’re going anywhere?”
“But you just said—”

August put his book down in his lap and sighed, frustrated. “Mother will tell us if we have to move and she has houses all over the world. Now stop worrying,” He said shortly, and buried his nose back in his book.

The yelling continued into the evening and well after the sun went down. The shadows cast from the windows at the top of the basement wall stretched to the other side of the room and up either side of the mounted television. Glover turned all the lights on downstairs and his brother told him not to waste electricity. August finished one book and started another. Glover was playing with his wireless anatomical model. It was the kind that you could watch what happened to the inside of the body when someone got sick. Currently he was watching the effects of black lung. Delphina woke up from her nap and started crying, but big brother Glover had found her favorite teddy bear and now she was sitting happily next to August pretending to read what he was reading.

“Gus,” Glover whispered. “I’m getting hungry.”

“Hungry, Gust Gust!” Delphina parroted.

“Yes, it is past dinnertime, isn’t it? But I don’t believe Mother has left yet.” He looked at the clock. “She never came to tell us goodbye.”

“Go up and talk to her, Gus. She always listens to you.”

“I don’t want to go up there,” August protested. “I don’t want to get caught up the kerfuffle.”

“The what?”

August rolled his eyes. “It means a commotion, a ruckus. Read a book once in a while.”

“I like talkies better, and TV is plenty educational,” Glover answered. “Please, August. Phina is going to bite us again if she doesn’t eat soon.”

August looks down at his sister. She was drooling and staring up at his neck. He pushed her over to the next cushion on the couch and stood up. “Alright, fine. Stay here, Phina. Don’t bite Glover.”

“No bite!” she repeated.

August went through the door at the top of the stairs that opened into the front hall. The chandelier was lit, but the bottom floor of the house was empty. Faint voices were resonating from the floor above him. He followed the voices up the curving staircases and down the hall to his mother’s study. The voices were growing increasingly louder and more vicious the closer he got to the door.

“…supposed to do with it?” the doctor was asking.

“We?” Mother’s voiced hissed. “We aren’t going to do anything. You made this mess and you are going to fix it!”
“What should I do? Make it look like an accident?”