You Left Us, Mama

Sera

I had to be hallucinating somehow.

My mother was dead. She died in a horrible car accident fifteen years ago. The woman who stood just a few feet away was surely just a ghost. The light from the hallway behind her almost gave her a glow. Not enough to make her seem like a half-transparent apparition, but imaginations could run wild, and I was able to make her seem like flesh and blood.

She was older, her skin less taut, streaks of gray in her dark brown hair.

Her eyes were the same, though. They were blue and gentle with love and care, the way she always looked at me, always with an edge of sorrow and pity. Yes, pity, and now I knew why.

Because I was a target, and as a child, I’d been blissfully unaware. She had painted that target. But even now as I realized that, I couldn’t be mad. It was only because she wanted to be free. She was only trying to be free of my father’s cage he’d trapped her in, and Leo and I couldn’t fit through the bars, because if we did…

We’d all be dead.

I