I'm Afraid Of My Own Mother

This story starts with shattered glass.  My mother was flung through the windshield after a head-on collision.  She was found ten feet away from the wreckage, covered in blood and broken glass.  The paramedics said that she had gone head-first through the windshield and her face had taken a substantial portion of the initial damage.  Her body was broken, bloody, and bruised, and there was little hope that she would survive, but the doctors told me she pulled through, and she was able to come home three weeks later.

I’m not sure she ever came home, though.

Her face is covered in gauze and stitches, to the point that I doubt her own sister would recognize a picture of her, but beyond that, her eyes are different.  Not all the time, but sometimes there’s something black behind them, like soot or ash, and they seem distant.  She doesn’t talk anymore, either.  The doctor said it’ll be a few months before she can talk like she used to – her tongue had to be repaired and she broke the majority of her teeth in the accident.

The way she looks at me though, I can tell there’s something… different.  Her hand rests on mine at the dinner table as if we’re about to say grace, except she never did that before.  She insists I kiss her goodnight through gestures and notes written on the boogie-board she was given, but she never seemed to care before.

She watches soap operas now and listens to different music. 

She hums sometimes in her sleep, and it doesn’t sound like her voice.

She sleeps with one of those facial masks on.  Through writing, she says it’s because it helps block out the light and her eyes are sensitive, but somehow I'm not sure I believe that.

Last night, as I lie awake in my bed, wondering about what exactly happened to her to make her so drastically different, I heard my bedroom door squeak.  I heard the soft pad of bare feed enter my room, and could hear the hoarse, thin breathing I’ve come to associate with my mother in the weeks since her accident.

I’m not sure why, but I didn’t want to turn over.  I didn’t want to see her white, bandaged face looking at me in the dark.  For the first time in my life, I was afraid of my own mother.

She stayed there in my room for what felt like hours, staring at what she thought was my sleeping figure in the dark, and worst of all, she was muttering something.  I haven’t heard her speak in weeks, but she was muttering something between breaths.  I don’t think she was speaking English, but it was so quiet that I can’t be sure that she was speaking at all.

At about five in the morning, she left my room and I was able to drift off into shallow sleep.  A few hours later, during breakfast this morning, I asked her how she slept.  She looked at me through glassy eyes and didn’t say a word.  She nodded slowly, then turned back to her orange juice and began to sip it through the straw.

After breakfast, just as I was about to leave for school, I heard a thumping sound.  I followed the noise to her bedroom and peered in, like a spying child, and found her standing across from the full-body mirror.  She was maybe an inch from it and looked like she was examining her bandages, then she slapped her head against the glass, recreating the thumping sound I’d heard earlier and sending chills like spiders up my spine at the same time.

A few seconds later, she did it again.

I watched in horror, somehow too afraid to stop her, as she continued this strange ritual again and again until the mirror developed smears of blood on it as the wounds in her forehead opened up and bled through the bandages.