By Savannah Brantley
I wake up and the light in the driveway is on. It floods my room, through my window, like a voice, yellow and dull. Mom has been missing for two days. Dad calls her a bad mom, says she doesn’t love us anymore, calls her a whore. I’m not sure what a whore is. I don’t know why the light in our driveway is on. There is a rising ball moving up my body; it clogs, makes my throat tight, makes it hard to breathe. There is not enough air. I leave my bed, walk on my toes, am readying for it, a something, a man, someone here to finally do us in, to be the pinnacle of bad things, because mom doesn’t love us anymore, has been missing for two days, and while she has always come back, dad has locked all the doors as if he knew, this time was different. I make myself small to look out the window. I don’t wanna be seen, and, there she is, my mom, her face a white grimace in the dark. A cigarette lines her lips red, makes the M poke out. I can see the ember burning, the smoke rising in slow waves. She is blooming. She hikes her elbows up and back into the air, raises the crowbar so that it sits above her, a rod catching light. Our Honda rocks, gently, takes it quietly. The rear lights flick red as it moves. My mom has been missing for two days and now she is scattering glass across our driveway. I am in my nightgown and the air is so hot that it sticks to my legs, my stomach, my arms. There is never enough air. She doesn’t notice me, me witnessing her; how I am complicit. The cigarette is still burning, but now it lays on the ground, the tip crumpled, the ember dying, blinking slow, like a firefly. I am complicit. I stick my arm through the holes in the Honda doors, wonder how it feels to have something removed, to be broken and filled with empty space. She stops screaming about the house being locked, about dad being a bastard, how these are the things that make her leave. She throws the crowbar into the grass. My mom is a whore. My mom has been missing for two days. She does not notice me in her rage, does not look me in the eye, and the next day she hands me a broom and tells me to sweep up what she’s broken. I do, and I think about how I am the one who opened the door.
Savannah Brantley is a Junior in Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. She writes mostly nonfiction essay, but enjoys poetry and short-story as well. She hopes to get her MFA, lives in Ohio, and loves raspberries.
