Losing Mother

By Vaughn T. Stanford

Something has gone horribly wrong with Josephine...

As her children struggle to accept a life-changing diagnosis, one son cloaks himself in denial while his sister subversively plots her escape from the unfolding nightmare.

It's left to the younger son to cope with his mother's increasingly bizarre symptoms, but his own stability begins to erode under the strain—with devastating results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WHUD Productions
• Release date: Dec 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393693420

Vaughn T. Stanford

Vaughn T. Stanford is the author of Consequences, a paranormal thriller, Tales from Mysteria, a young adult fantasy collection, Fighting to Keep My Underwear On, a humorous novel about the misadventures of a single man, and the short story anthology Unseemly Behavior. He has written and directed public service short films on HIV/AIDS funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). His play about family dysfunction, Conflicted, was performed at the historic Little Carib Theatre in Trinidad and was later televised on CNC3. He is a high school mathematics teacher.

Book preview

I

W here them children ? I ask out loud to no one in particular, panicking as I pull open the front door. He is sitting on the porch, on his phone as usual, but the children are nowhere in sight.

They gone home already, he mutters, not looking up, as if I am bothering him.

With who? I persist, my eyes searching the premises and the field across the road. It is night, and in spite of the lights on in the field, I can scarcely make out a soul.

"Their mother." He sighs heavily.

But they didn’t even tell me they was going? I wait for him to say something, anything, but he barely speaks to me anymore, and when he does it’s usually to snap at me as if I’m some stray dog nosing around where I don’t belong.

I realize that he is not going to say any more so I go back inside and close the door. I can’t believe that this has happened again. The children would be playing right on the floor in the living room, I would take my eyes off them for a minute to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen and just like that, poof, they disappear.

My life is getting stranger by the day. These people in this house are always making a big deal of everything, always blaming me when something goes wrong or when something goes missing, but I think they are just wicked people.  I don’t want to live with them anymore. So I will go home by my mother, down south where I grew up, and I won’t have to deal with them again.

I am hungry now. I should make some dinner for myself. I go to the kitchen and search for the matches but find none. That’s another thing with these people: they are always hiding things away from me and it frustrates me. Why do I have to ask them for anything? I am not a little child and I certainly don’t owe them a thing.

You have—er—the thing to light the stove? I say to one of them sitting on the couch. It bothers me that words seem to run away from me when I need them, but the girl sitting on the couch, in front of the TV, knows what I mean. I’m not sure if she is looking at the Indian program, or looking at something on her phone, or writing something in that book of hers. She always has that book.

I’ll bring it for you, she says, but she is taking a long time to come so I go and lie down a bit. From my bedroom, next to the kitchen, I hear her fighting up with the gas tank; I hear her strike the match and then I hear the noise the pot makes as she places it on the stove, metal on metal.

Not long after, she tells me the cup of tea is on the table, so I get up and go to the kitchen. I go to the cupboard, remove the bread and sit at the table. She offers me cheese, jam, peanut butter, and egg to eat with my two slices of bread but I refuse them all. I like having my tea with bread. That’s all. Why do they keep harassing me to eat something else? Everything else burns my stomach.

Well, that is you. Stay so, nah? See if I care. She flounces out of the room and takes up her throne in front of the TV once again.

Once I’m finished with my dinner, I go to the linen closet and pick up my nightly bundle. I also arm myself with a bag of clothespins. I make my way to the dining room and lay everything down on the table. If I don’t perform this nightly ritual, these people will not for they are too lazy. I pin a towel to the first blind that is hanging in front of one of the windows facing the road. I attach my duster to the top of the second blind and a pillow case to the bottom of the same blind. On the security gate at the side door, I hang one of the curtains from the kitchen. I have too many of those anyway, just sitting in the cupboard. I am very careful at night because I don’t want anyone passing in the road to look in and see what we’re doing in