UNTITLED [PREVIEW]
© Fred Dumpling. Redistribution is prohibited.
Some days, your mother did not love you. When she could bear to look at you, a grief filled her eyes that you did not understand. Other days, she watched you with an intensity that was equally inscrutable, as if you might disappear in an instant. Dissolve. Decay. You thought it was simply a mother's love——something you, too, would feel one day when you were much, much older.
But as you grew, you understood that this was not the case. Your nurse was a mother, as were your tutor and the cook. They did not exhibit the emptiness your mother did: the vacant stare, the feelingless words. Even when you were too old to curl in your mother's lap, you curled in your nurse's, crying into her shoulder as she covered your ears, muffling the bellows from the film room.
Your mother loved film, you knew. More than she loved you, at any rate, and more than she loved your father. You began to suspect that what she loved, what she saw when she examined your face, was not you at all but something from a very long time ago, something lost that she sought to recover from the films she watched endlessly from the divan. You don't think she ever did, or she might have been satisfied. She might have stopped, awoken, realized she had had a daughter so many years ago, and loved you.
One day, a day when you still believed in your mother's love, she pulled you into her lap as the two of you watched some comedy about a band of thieves. She told you she used to make films, you know. But when you asked to see them, her smile faltered, and a distance opened between you. Recognizing the switch, you asked instead why she had stopped. In response, she drifted even further away until she was completely out of your grasp, even as you remained in her now apathetic embrace. Realizing your mother no longer loved you, you slipped from her arms and from the room. You stopped in the doorway to cast a backward glance: your mother's eyes had returned to the film, her expressionless face wan from the ghostly light of the screen.
You passed your father on the way out. Lifting your skirts, you ran the rest of the way to your nurse's chambers, not wanting to hear the yells that you knew would fall on deaf ears.