Broken Dishes

Crack!

Dishes break when Mommy is angry.

They take to the sky, to test wings they haven't grown and come crashing to their death.

Mommy swears.

She starts banging on bedroom doors, trying to find one of us. It's our faults, she says. We made her mad, so the plates broke. Or the cups. Or that china vase grandma gave us last Christmas.

She usually makes me clean things up.

I'm the youngest.

I don't fight back.

Jenna fights back. She gave Mommy a black eye and a bloody lip once. She hollered and threatened and said she'd run away.

Mommy doesn’t bother her anymore.

Bret doesn't fight back, but Mommy is scared of him anyway. She curses and spits at him and says he looks like Goddamn Bill.

I don't fight back, either.

But Mommy still makes me do stuff by whacking me. When we were all littler, we used to compare bruises, to see who had the best.

I always used to win, but now I'm the only one with bruises anyway, so it doesn't matter anymore.

Last time things broke, I tried to hide in Jenna's room, but she got mad and threw me out and then Mommy hit me for making her worry. And I still had to clean glass off the floor.

Jenna locks her door now.

I tried hiding with Brett once too, but he didn't like having me in his room 'cause I didn't want to naked wrestle with him.

Brett's too big to wrestle with and he grabs places that hurt, sometimes.

My bedroom isn't safe at all.

The door doesn't lock.

Mommy can come in any time, and she does. She woke me up at two in the morning, once, to clean up a broken set of mugs. I fell asleep in school the next day and the office called her.

She was mad at me then.

She said I couldn't let anything interfere with school or I'd be a failure like Jenna or a dropout like Brett.

I promised I wouldn't and she hugged me then, and told me she was proud.

I would have done anything to make her proud.

#

The dishes break downstairs and I hide in my closet. It's almost too small now, and when I grow again I won't fit. There's cussing and yelling downstairs.

Something else breaks.

Mommy screams, but it's not anger-scream; it's fear-scream like when she had a boyfriend one week who liked sneaking into Jenna's room.

Something else smashes.

That's gonna be a lot to clean up.

She screams again and then it's quiet. No more breaking things.

I hear footsteps on the stairs, and shutting doors. I wait for Mommy to come find me, but she doesn't.

I'm hungry.

I go down the stairs and through the living room. The lamp is broken. It's dark.

The lights are on in the kitchen.

There's glass all over the floor. One of the windows broke. There's a box of poptarts sitting out. I take one.

They shouldn't be out.

I got to put them away.

The pantry door is already open.

I make sure to close it.

I go back upstairs. There's blood on the steps.

My bedroom door is open.

I never leave the door open.

The lights are off.

I flick them on.

#

I scream Brett's name and pound on his door, but he doesn't answer. I run to Jenna's room and don't stop knocking until she answers.

Mommy – it's Mommy – my bed -

Jenna sneers.

She pushes me away from the door.

"Yeah, fucker," she says. "I know."