*"She uh... says she loves him."*

Figures. Fucking figures.

I couldn’t really hide the grimace on my face as Auntie confirmed the one, great fear I had about that jackass. That my Ma would find something attractive about him like that, that he would be a thing that soothed her demons better than anyone else could. No, I couldn’t see what Ma saw in him (and maybe there was some bias there) and it made my mouth go sweet and sour just chewing on the thought—that she was following her heart, and it was leading her right off the edge of a great, black-plated mountaintop with fucked up shapes etched in the cliff face.

*"Do you not like him?"*

Oh, uh—

I snapped back to when Auntie asked me that question—calling me out, clean and simple, but I guess you can’t really call out the obvious, can you? I could feel the pull of my face and even knowing full well that it was there, I was still having trouble  wiping it off my eyes, my stiff mouth. It’s one of the hardest things about wearing your heart on your sleeve: it’s sorta stitched there. It’s just, at that moment, I wasn’t about to fall in that particular blackness in front of Auntie. I didn’t want no one to see me at my lowest. No one I cared about, at least.

“We—uh, don’t play nice,” I said, looking hard to my right as I shrugged off the nightmare clinging to my back (Are you happy to hear now that even though your mother was raped by a god—). My jaw tensed, because it was still a hard pill to swallow, especially with someone watching me like that. “…But I guess I don’t need to like him if he makes Ma happy, huh?” There, I said it. And it tasted awful and it made my chest pull painfully and in the back of my eyes I knew there was something being poised to make some tears—but I said it out loud, finally. Which made it official.

Agh jee, I wanted to drop this heavy shit, all this painful talk ‘n whatever, but Auntie wasn’t finished prodding through all kinds of terrible shit. It got even better: she started asking me about Midas, like the shit that happened with him wasn’t public knowledge. Which meant that it had fallen to me to tell her about it.

I just sorta stared at her, though, cuz oh shit. I’d never had to do something like this before; usually I was free to feel however the fuck I wanted to, cuz everyone else either knew or didn’t know about whatever the fuck was making me feel that way, and it wasn’t up to me to change that status. But I can’t just ignore Auntie’s ignorance like that. I don’t know who Midas was to her, or how she felt about him, or anything—I’d barely seen him during my childhood in the ‘Hills—but he was the father of her daughter, so that was important enough.

“Auntie…he died…” I said in a hushed, slightly incredulous voice—cuz I couldn’t hide the shock of her not knowing about it fast enough. And oh shit that’s right, we need an even heavier sprinkling of shitty feelings all over this heaping pile by reminding me of the shit that surrounded his death. “…during the invasion.”

And just fuck me forever cuz I couldn’t stop that slip of cold, dark bitterness that was so damn-near an accusation.







"talk"