The Homecoming
Now that I was back in the house I had grown up in, I felt like a twisted version of the ten-year-old who had known daily terror here. Only now, the tables were turned. Was I evil? Had I turned into my mother, the thing I despised? Outside of these walls I knew I wasn’t a bad person. I had a life, friends, my own home. But here, caught in the orbit of the memories and the stench of her failing body, I once again became something else. I went into the bathroom, and flushed the oxycodone down the toilet. God help me, but it felt good to have this power over her, to be able to dictate her suffering just as she had dictated mine. After all, it had been her choice to lie there in filth. She told me when she was diagnosed that she wanted no help. She could have moved into hospice care. She must have known that at some point I’d have to come back. I guess she wanted to see if she could terrify and intimidate me one more time, manipulating me with my forced obligation to her. Well, fuck that. Now she could enjoy what she had created, and we could dance this final dance together. Later I went upstairs and cleared off a portion of my old bed. I lay awake all night, listening to the pain-filled moans of my mother in the next room.
The next morning I called the neighbor to let her know I was there and that mother was as comfortable as possible, given her advanced condition. She was reassured by my caring and medically knowledgeable tone, and sounded relieved to be released from her obligation to check on her. With no other friends or relatives to speak of, now my mother and I were alone.
She had soiled the sheets again, though with no food or water, there wasn’t much mess to speak of. She moved less on that second day, and her dry throat had reduced her moans to wispy growls and weak coughs. She never spoke, just lay curled up in a fetal position on her bed. By now she fully understood that I planned to watch her die, and her eyes looked at me with undiluted hatred. They glowed with the ferocity of her anger, the condensed malice of all those years swirled down into this single point on this single day. Without a blink, I looked back at her, my stare hard as granite. “I am your legacy,” I said without emotion. “Whatever I am, you are responsible.” I waved the empty pill bottle in her face. “Like mother, like daughter.” Her eyes were blank and dead, staring at me with remorseless evil. I knew she couldn’t reply or defend herself, and I didn’t care. All that was left inside of me was cruelty.
If asked, I couldn’t have explained why I was doing it. I had never had childish fantasies of revenge against my mother. I only remember how I felt when it was happening, how each and every time my emotions cycled through fear, then anger, finally to pure, cold, burning hatred, before she inevitably conquered me and I returned to dog-like humility. I hadn’t planned to kill her one day. But the moment I got here, somehow, everything changed. In the instant I laid eyes on her I became the judge, the jury, and the executioner. From some forgotten place deep inside me came the desire to inflict back on her some of the suffering she had so easily meted out to me all those years ago.
She lasted a week. During that time I carried on with cold, detached efficiency, cleaning up the house, washing and scrubbing everything. I threw out bags and boxes of her accumulated garbage. I kept the door to her room closed, only checking on her a couple of times a day. I slept soundly, without a thought or a dream devoted to the suffering, evil lump of a creature in the next room. After four days she stopped defecating and urinating completely. What was already there dried onto the sheets. Her lips cracked and bled, the blood drying in successive layers until her lips were nearly glued shut. Her hands, now nothing more than claws, clutched at the sheets. What was left of her hair came out in clumps that I left on the pillow.
Frequently when I checked on her I found her sleeping, her dry, rattling breath echoing in her lungs and nasal passages. Now and again, however, she was awake when I opened the door, watching. Her eyes were steady and resigned as she looked at me, radiating hate like a warm fire. As days passed, any thoughts I had of saving her were abandoned. The look in her eyes, even as she hovered near death, was the culmination of all my years of neglect and abuse. I feared her, and loathed her, and loved her. She had become barely recognizable as human. She was my mother.
On the seventh day I took the pillow that lay next to her and pushed it down over her face. She only moved a little before her body relaxed and her breath left in one last rattling echo. I checked her pulse and left her lying there in a dried pile of her own shit and piss to think about my new state in the world.
As I said, it’s a strange feeling to be happy about the death of a parent. I sat on the back steps, imagining life without her, breathing raggedly and wishing I had a cigarette. I had just killed my mother, and somehow I couldn’t muster up any remorse for it. She had left me nothing but the same gifts she had given me in life – fear, bewilderment, anger, and loss. I sat there all day and into the night, thinking, remembering, and finally, understanding.
Later I went inside. I left the lights out, breathing in the scent of this place, fear and elation now replaced by acceptance. I realized that this was my mother’s plan all along, to bring me here, to bring me to her, to use her own death as a means to complete her masterpiece. I am her life’s work, her creation, the legacy she means to claim. As a child I had made the mistake of seeing her abuse as individual episodes of fury and cruelty. Now I understand that she was sculpting the evil inside me like clay, working over each facet of my soul with deft fingers and timeless patience. I am finished now, waiting to be claimed.
And so, in the end, here I sit in the dark. I found some paper in a drawer, and have spent the time writing everything down, though I’m not even sure why. I know I don’t have much time left. Hours ago I heard the door to her room open, followed by steadily louder thumps and the scratches of her fingernails in the wood of the steps. I’ve known all along that there was nowhere to go where she wouldn’t find me. It’s why I came back here, in the end. In a few minutes the door will open, and we’ll dance that last dance together, my mother and I, chained by our fate and our sins. I’ll leave this, to be read or discarded by whoever finds it. In the end it doesn’t matter anyway. Hope left this house a long time ago.
Lynette Mejía is from Lafayette, Louisiana, USA, where she lives with her husband, two children, and two laid back kitties. She loves reading and writing horror, fantasy and speculative fiction. This is her first published story.