The July Featured writer is Ron Shortt

Please feel free to email Ron at: ron_shortt@live.com

MOTHER
by Ron Shortt

I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t believe Brenda left.

I was heartbroken and didn’t understand why this was happening. Things hadn’t been perfect but I didn’t expect her to do this. She didn’t even say goodbye. While we slept, she got up and took most of what she could fit in her car. When I woke up, I found her side of the bed empty, cold…and a note on the kitchen table:

John: I’m sorry things just aren’t working out. I have to go home. Whatever I left, just get rid of it or do whatever with it.

That was all it said. I tried to call her but it was pointless becausse she wouldn‘t answer. I paced around the apartment, feeling anxious and wanting her back. I kept thinking of all the things I should have done differently.

Would it have really mattered, though? I knew she had never been happy in Summer Hill. It was never her home. It was mine and she knew I wouldn’t leave.

I tried to call my mother. My sister answered. I told her about the note and Brenda leaving while I slept. All she could do was assure me it was probably for the best and then said out mother was out shopping.

I ended up opening a bottle of wine. By lunch time I was drunk. That couldn’t be good to be drunk so early and on a Sunday. I didn’t care though. I ended up falling back asleep.

When I woke, it was after five. I took a shower then tried calling my mother again, with no result. I didn’t like that. It made me worry, so I decided to go check on her, since her house was only ten minutes away.

I never knocked on my mother’s door. She didn’t like when I did; she said it made her jump thinking she was going to have unexpected company and that my sister Nora and I were always welcome company. I opened the door and went in.

“Mom!” I called out. It was silent. “Mom!” I called again. Finally she responded.

“I’m upstairs!” She called back. Relieved, I skipped up the stairs.

“Mom, I tried calling you twice today. Why didn’t you answer?” I spoke before entering her room.

The door was slightly ajar, and when I went inside, it seemed dark. A bit of sundown peered through the cracks of a heavy red blanket she had for some reason draped over the curtain. A strange smell bit my nose; it reminded me of oranges that had sat in a fruit basket too long, rotten but still fragrant with citrus. Another smell, deeper and incomprehensible, lingered just beneath it.

On the bed, my mother’s back faced me as she lay sideways.

“Are you okay, Mom?” I asked, forgetting Brenda for the moment.

“Yes, just not feeling well.” Her voice sounded hollow.

“Do you need to go to the hospital? Why do you have it so dark in here? Should I turn the lamp on?”

“No, it’s just a stomach pain; it will pass. The light bothers me. Don’t turn the lamp on.”

I was frightened. The smell and how my mother was acting scared me. I thought of calling Nora, telling her to come over, but I knew she’d be too busy…she was always busy.

“Would you like something to drink?” I asked wanting my mother to be okay.

“No.” Then there was just silence, my mind whirling around her in pain and being strange and me not knowing what else to say.

Then finally I broke the silence, needing to vent about my awful morning. “Brenda left me.” I felt my voice crack. I was hurt and felt like crying and hugging my mother, letting her comfort me but that wasn’t going to happen. Something here was out of place and very wrong.

“Oh.” That was it…that was all she had to say about it. I knew how fond she was of Brenda; I knew she’d be upset too, but no. In the silence that was growing again I heard a grumble from her stomach. It was loud and offensive.

“Are you hungry, Mom?” I asked, fearing the returning monotone that had overcome her, that was nothing like her at all. She was normally a lively woman, always busy, never still.

“Just go. Go home. Come back later and I will be better.” I couldn’t believe my mother was telling me to leave! She never did that.

I put a hand on her shoulder she pulled away, but not before I felt the cool skin beneath her nightgown. I was surprised that she was still in her nightgown from the night before; she would never do that.

“Okay, I’ll go. But please call me if you need anything.” She said nothing back.

I left the room and went downstairs, but I certainly wasn’t going to leave her alone like this. The whole scene made no sense. I went into the kitchen and turned on the light. I picked up the cordless phone my mother had sitting on the counter and called Nora.

“Hey, I think you should come over. Something’s not right with Mom.” I explained to her how our mother was acting, although I didn’t mention the smell.

“She’s just sad, probably. She has her bad days sometimes I’m sure…we all do. Even though Dad’s been gone for almost seven years, it still hurts her, more than us in certain ways.” She didn’t understand at all, I sensed.

“But this is different. I’ve seen her depressed and this is beyond that. She’s not herself at all,” I said knowing Nora wasn’t going to come over.

“Well, maybe you should stay there tonight. You don’t want to be home alone anyway. Let me know how Mom is doing in the morning. If she isn’t any better, I’ll come over after work.” Her mind was already leaving the situation. I could hear her fiancé Tom in the background calling to her.

“Okay, I think I will stay here. I’ll talk to you later.”

After I hung up, I noticed what I hadn’t when first entering the kitchen. The door to the back yard in the kitchen was cracked just a tiny bit. It was dark out now.

I flipped the switch to the outside light and pushed the door open stepping out. I slipped on something and fell, hitting the center of my back on the doorsill. I yelled out because it hurt, but I figured it wasn’t serious.

I pushed myself up and looked to see what I had slipped on. On the paved sidewalk that lead from the back door to my father’s old work shed was a vibrant green substance. It trailed the whole of the length of the sidewalk in splotches.

I knelt, feeling a tinge of pain echoing from my back. I wiped with my index and middle finger at the substance. It smelled of my mother’s room, that smell of decomposing oranges and something worse. The texture was thick and slimy like jam. It was cold to the touch.

I unlatched the gray door to the shed and walked in, careful not to slip again. I pulled the string to the bulb in the ceiling. Yellow light flooded around me.

The floor of the shed was wood. In the back corner near some cardboard boxes I could see where the floor had been torn apart. Looking further, I saw it had been broken from underneath. The boards were smashed through with vehemence, leaving a gaping hole.

I grabbed a flashlight from a workbench. I shined it in the hole. I was appalled and horrified to see a large cavity deep enough for me to stand in and not be able to see over the opening of the floor. Inside was more of green slime and some kind of torn, flesh-like membrane. It was pale and thick. It looked like it had been some sort of cocoon.

I thought this was all a bad nightmare that began this morning when Brenda walked out on me. It had to be a dream because this was madness. I needed to wake up. Was this day really happening?

It seemed it was. I didn’t know what the substance was or what had been in that hole but somehow I knew that whatever it was, it had something to do with how my mother was acting.

I went back inside the house and thought of calling Nora again but didn’t. Instead, I went upstairs. My mother’s room was now fully dark.

“Mom, what the hell’s going on here? What’s in the shed?” 

“I’m glad you came back,” she said, still lying on her side facing away, the only light cast from the hallway. I noticed some of the green slime on the back of her white gown.

I turned on the bedside lamp. I had to see her to make sure she was okay and that nothing had hurt her; nothing had gotten her. I walked around the bed and suddenly I was unable to move, frozen with shock.

Her chest had been carved out from her breast bone to mid stomach. Something was there filling it…it was large and looked like a giant grasshopper. It was black with yellowish-brown markings in the shape of rigid triangles, mixed with flesh and blood and the green slime. It glistened in the light.

The thing’s head lay at the edge of her throat. Two pincers clasped her lower jaw and from its head a clear tubular structure had pierced her forehead. The abominations bottom had connected with the ripped opening of her stomach in a fusing unnatural way.

Her jaw moved. The creature was using her to speak to me. “There…almost ready! They will be hungry. Sit down.” It was my mother’s voice, but not her words.

The creature forced my mother’s body to sit up; it was like watching a rag doll or puppet move…jerking, unnatural. I almost fell back with fear and shock. I ran past as she, or it, reared up out of the bed.

I ran down the steps and out the front door. It didn’t follow. Maybe it didn’t even come down the steps, I wasn’t sure. I was in my car about to pull away, I was distraught, disgusted and horrified. How do you deal with something like this? I couldn’t grasp it. No matter what happened the worst of it was that she was dead, that thing killed her and was using her. I couldn’t let it live, not because of what it and its brood would do to others but because it had hurt my mother.

I dialed 911 on my cell phone. I told them there was an emergency at my mother’s home. The dispatch said she’d get someone on the way.

But that could take time. The monster could use that time to escape into the world.

I got out of my car. I couldn’t wait. I had to kill it.

I ran into the side door of the garage. I was going to burn it. I didn’t ever want to see the desecration of my mother’s body again, she wouldn’t want anyone to.

I knew there was a gas canister for the lawn mower in here. There was something else in the garage that startled me. Brenda’s car. She must have come to tell my mother goodbye. Where was she now? Had it gotten her? At that moment, I was angry, wishing the creature had killed Brenda, not my mother. It was a horrible thought to wish such a death on anyone, but I wanted my mother back.

I looked into Brenda’s car but saw no sign of her. There was no time to figure it out not until I ended that thing’s life. I walked to the other side of the vehicle. She was there on the ground dead. Wait! I could see her chest moving in low pulses. I knelt and shook her.

“Brenda!” I shook her, but she wouldn’t come to. Then I saw the piercing hole in her head like the one in my mother’s.

I picked her up and put her inside the car, propped up on the seat. Let the paramedics deal with her when they arrive, I thought.

I grabbed a match booklet from her glove compartment. I got the gas can and ran back to the house. The creature stood on the stairs and began to slowly descend, careful not to tumble over while using my mother’s corpse as its host. She never blinked just stared with a hollowness, I wanted to cry and scream but didn’t.

The creature inside my mother spoke. “Come to your mother.”

It moved her jaw with its pincers. Blood had dried around her lips and trickled in a thick line from her nose. Two more lines of deep red had dripped from her ears down her cheeks. Moonlight through the parlor windows illuminated her pale flesh and gleamed off the slimy, healthy creature inside my dead mother.

“My Mom’s dead. You killed her, whatever you are and I’m going to kill you and your babies.”

It pulled her jaw down in a black opening gape and held it there for a long moment before speaking.

“What we are? We are you, we are everything, we were here long ago before anything else. Everything living comes from us. We have returned for our world. There’s no escape. We are coming.”

“If I have to die I will, but I will die knowing I killed you.” I said, not feeling I had anything left to live for. I ran to the stairs, thrusting the open canister at it, and saw it wince, and then my mother’s body shuttered and began to shake. Her stomach was pulsing…I knew it was going to burst and release more of the creatures.

I scratched a chunk of several matches against the back of the booklet and threw them at the monster’s feet. It ignited, the room brightened by the burning and filled with a thousand screams of its bursting brood, horrible miniatures of the creature. I left and ran out of the house.

Then I saw them, down the street at every house stood people, whole families all staring at me. I squinted my eyes and could see they all had been killed and they all had the creatures attached to their chests. If I had a gun the only sane thing would have been to use it on myself, but I didn’t.

Instinctively I knew that there would be no paramedics and no police to arrive. There would be no cavalry to save the day.

I thought wildly, Maybe I could get in Brenda’s car and maul them down.

It was no use. Brenda had left me on the day the world ended.

Ron Shortt has been interested in writing since the third grade. He has been published in The Wifiles and The Horror Zine.