The corners of my mouth naturally dripped down, forming an inverted U. That was it, my grandmother said — that was definitely the reason why my mother hated me so much. She didn’t hate me…

She detested looking at my face.

For the longest time, my mom’s face remained as faint as a phantom that at times showed up in my dreams. Her eyes never had me, and mine barely caught her. She always came home after the clock struck 12, and I would already be tucked in the thin Spongebob blanket gifted by the old lady next door on my fifth birthday. It had already grown two sizes smaller, leaving my feet bare and brisk in the dark. I could recall the echoes of the sharp click-clack sound of her heels tapping the marble floor, sporadic and intermittent, and envision her stagger, bound to fall. By the time I woke up, I would only see her flopping on the bed — her hair tangled, her heel dangling on one foot, barely holding on. A short glance, then I would hurry to 7-Eleven to grab breakfast before school. The fridge, the kitchen, the living room were nothing but dust-catchers and space-fillers, since for what use! There was no such thing as family dinners or movie nights here anyways, in this place that remotely resembled a home. 

It felt as if we coexisted, but never crossed into each other’s world. 

That fateful night, I bumped my leg on the corner of the tea table and it slit a thin line of wound oozing blood. The sight of red about to stain her perfectly cream couch perhaps broke her indifferent wall, so she took me by the arm and lifted me on the tea table. Whisking a band aid from her purse, she kneeled on the floor in front of me in her black dress. Her warm breath, alcohol-soaked, sent electric sensation up my spine as she leaned in to tend to my wound. Her tender fingers brushed across my knee. From above, her mascaraed eyelashes were deftly curled, making up for her tufts of damaged hair that were brittle and bleached like the extra strands of a worn rope. I looked at her pointy manicured nails, blood-red and bold, and at times embellished with sparkling rhinestones, clumsily peeling the band aid apart to stick on my wound. And just like that, she left. 

I could never tell whether she, constrained by the blood tie, felt obliged to take care of my wounds, but I have learnt to exploit and beg for her motherly compassion so that I can be one step closer to her and wrapped in that delusional embrace. I bumped more, cut myself more, and gathered more wounds and bruises — the more severe, the longer she would stay. 

Strange, how pain can be a charm of mine.  

***

Down my memory lane, I always found myself trying to bring up a story, to ask questions to prolong the conversation and she would end it. In a haze, I go back to being 7, approaching her from behind and cautiously pulling her dress.

“Mom, can I ask you something?”

Without a single glance over her back, her silence invited me further, “What do you like, mom?”, for I latched onto anything that was not a flat refusal. 

Still not even tilting her head, she shrugged, “Anything” 

“Your birthday is tomorrow, what do you want for your bir- ?” 

“Nothing”, and she walked away.

That day, I felt like a discarded piece of rag, shoved to the deepest corner of her mind. I couldn’t fill the silence though the burning questions were always at the tip of my tongue. Alas, she remained a shadow to me, vague and illusory. The day after that, I bought roses, dark-crimson and bold like her. Their velvety petals were so delicate, and their texture, man!, as soft as her fingers, brushing through my skin. The roses were meant for her, but even if she didn’t like roses, they would bring some colour to the gloom. The only vase in the kitchen was boxed and placed in the highest cabinet, so I climbed on a ladder and took it down. The vase was pear-shaped and glossy dark, but disproportionately high and big for the blooms. The keenest eye would not be able to spot the stem, only the red blooms that barely protruded from the black vase: barely with any room to breathe. The combination looked weird, but wouldn’t it be worse if I left them scattered on the table? While my mind still hovered over the question, I filled the vase with water to keep the roses fresh just in time for her to come home. 

She didn’t come home that day, or the next. I didn’t see her that week, and the roses remained untouched and unseen. Dismally they drooped, laden by debris and sucked dry of colour. But the petals didn’t fall on the table — they hung on, and half-dangled on the mouth of the vase. When she finally came home, I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eyes. How could, how could she be so apathetic? My tears welled up when I heard her casual remark:

“Where did that come from?” 

And I had already left a note From Jay next to it…

***

Can’t you see? Words, gifts, efforts — not even one could penetrate her guard. At the end of the day, nothing was as effortless as the wounds. But irritatingly, bruises would eventually fade and cuts would heal, and they would no longer prick her motherly conscience to come to me and quench my thirst for her warmth. 

I experimented with pain: the hardest to heal were burns. They started with a swell on my skin, conspicuously ugly. She would come to my side and brush her tender fingers across my skin under water. Better yet, every time she peeled the band aid and saw the hideous opening of flesh and pus, her blank stares would startle and her brows furrowed. She left, always as brief as an elusive wind, but always enough to stir a levitating sensation of love that smoulders and simmers in me for the rest of the day. 

That was long ago in the early 2000s — I burned to get her love, and her love still burns on my skin. 

_______

Back in St. Andrew’s High School, if you ask anyone from Class of 1998, no one would not have known of Erica Lewis, the face imprinted on a glass pane down the main corridor, the guaranteed spot on the first 3 rows of the class ranking. Simply, her name in itself radiated academic glory. 

To her classmates, books and words were mere scratches of ink. For her, it was a ticket to freedom — it was life. Through the small window of her room at home, one can see a flickering light, covered under a thick grey blanket, simmering with hopes and yearns of a young girl. And that little girl was reading a full volume Algebra Course book, at times raising the blanket to get more air and cool down the beads of sweat crowding on the back of her neck. 

One would wonder why such torment? Why hide? 

For outside of this haven, there would only be gazes of disapproval and hiss of contempt from her mother, whose pride and life was the kitchen and whose purpose was to raise a daughter into an exemplary housewife, good enough to be married into a family of nobility and wealth. Erica would be tumbling in her academic toil, dropping tears of frustration when maths problems were too stubborn to give away hints, and her mother would conveniently invite her friends over to relish the most raucous howls of laughter and then call Erica out to twirl around in most ridiculous frills of dresses. Or Erica would be wrestling with her inner demons begging her to rest in order to complete her work, but her mother would walk straight into her room and slap on her back for disobedience. 

“Go to sleep, or wrinkles and eyebags will form all over your face. Who will marry an old hag?”, they barely talked, and barely did the words stick to Erica — it was not like whatever came out of her mother’s curled lips was genuine affection anyways. 

For all those years, she lived to learn, learned to live a double life with a panting desire to be unchained from this yoke of her home. She was single-minded to turn her preconceived fate as a housewife into the servant of her will. She knew more than anyone that the key to unlock such fetters was to be accepted into a prestigious university — so prestigious that even her conservative mother’s frowning mouth would beam in the thoughts of her landing a, perhaps, husband from Ivy league where she envisioned to study. The moment she escaped this hellhole, she would earn a well-paid job, change her name and never return. 

Erica could neither ask her mom for tutors nor extra books to learn, for her academic journey wasn’t meant to run far. Dyed with this fate, there were no rooms for complaints but solutions. So she ought to align with her mother’s desire by befriending this rich boy, whose father ran a business powerful enough to bequeath this noble and privileged lifestyle to the next two generations. That in itself was enough to coax her mother to have study sessions with the boy, through which she could extort him for books and free tutors. 

The scheme was well-crafted, but Erica was boldly complacent to presume that she could discard any budding feelings for the boy. Over time, the chairs at each end of the table inched closer until shoulder to shoulder, where each touch stirred a nervous tingling in her soul. Erica would shyly tuck her stray hair behind her ear and fiddle with her clothing as he looked at her in the eyes. In her muse, numbers and words must give way to his beaming smiles and unknowingly, she would smile as well, with glowing cheeks and flushed skins. Eventually, they went from winking eyes to slight touches, from touches on desks to full embraces on beds. She couldn’t hold herself rational — pregnancy and college application eventually crossed paths and her dreams of independence remained mere dreams.  

Abort!

Erica sneaked to a back-alley clinic not to have her family’s name shamefully engraved on the official records, that she committed what her mother called a crime against God. That meant the doctors didn’t have a licence and the clinic could only store pills with fading expiration dates and ripped-off plastic labels. She was led into a shabby room that gave off a ghostly echo, with tattered hangings and fissured walls. Up on the stucco ceiling, moths were shuddering anxiously round and round the lanterns. She shifted her eyes towards the half-bent metallic equipment recoiling on the tray, perhaps unsterilised and never touched upon either, and let off a sigh. 

Under this flickering light on the hard operation table, she closed her eyes, pushing tears down her cheeks. She wept, not because she might never be able to open those eyes again, but because even when she could, she wouldn’t be able to see light and freedom. Under anaesthesia, her senses muddled and grew blank; the scrapes of the wooden chair grew distant and the illusion of a doting mother so dearly needed at that moment faded away into her unconsciousness.

The operation went unsurprisingly wrong, and Erica bled so much that the quack just dumped her in front of the district’s hospital, whose staff would phone the guardians and thus, she was caught. It was her mother who came, and worse than the usual slaps across her back, Erica was treated to the front row of her mother’s exclusive stage where her mother shone brightly in the role of her life, an Oscar-worthy actress. Erica witnessed artificial tears of torment as her mother wailed to the poor boy’s family, accusing him of assaulting her. She pretended to sleep through her mother’s hysterical laugh when receiving his mother’s plea for a small cosy wedding. Her life ended at the altar at 17 years old with her slightly protruding stomach taped shut by her own mother so she could fit into the most lavish wedding dress. 

On the first day of the winter in 1999, she bore a kid alone in a local hospital and gave him a convenient name of Jay. Yet she gasped and wailed for the first time at the beastly sight of the creature she never wanted nor deserved. Jay was born with a ghastly defection on his neck, a cruel reminder of her failed attempt to terminate his life at the 26th week. More than that, Jay was the living proof, a haunting manifestation, of every mistake she had made in her entire life. Perhaps therefore her heart had frozen and locked tight. Then how could any flowers of joy bloom in this barren land? 

Little did she know, in a weathered crack hidden in the darkest corner of her heart, a plant grew determined and bold, breathed life once more and healed scars of the old. Jay was carefree and unknowing — always prattling on her lap, toddling after her and snuggling into her embrace — yet it was as if he was making up for the void inside Erica, whose blue eyes were a forever plunging melancholy that no one cared enough to look into. Jay would approach her on his flimsy legs, smudging his little palms over her drenched eyes, and she would lift Jay and place him far away from her. The sight of his defects did give her pumps of revulsion, but her heart at times would soften as his innocent eyes gazed deeply into hers. 

No, sparing love was crueller than no love at all, for it pushed people to the acme of joy and pulled them to collapse in the devastating truth that they weren’t loved at all. She had experienced it through her mother and now her husband — it was brutal, so she refused to give Jay what she barely had: love. 

When Jay fell as he toddled towards her, he got back on his knees and stood up again. He didn’t weep a single tear, but his mother did — from afar. His first fall grated her heart, the heart of a mother, poking her to scurry towards him and wrap him with full embrace. But she wrestled herself to stay still, tear-dimmed and clenched fists so tense that left a visible vein throb on her wrists. And as the mental battle was one step away from tearing her apart, she shut her eyes tight, and everything would be over: she would be unchained from guilt and responsibility. From then onwards, she became accustomed to holding herself, suppressing twitches at the corner of her smile as she witnessed his first drawing of her, his first day in school, his writing of her proudly stamped with a 10 in bold red. But she would turn away with teardrops rolling down her cheeks — she would rather be a full-time villain than an occasional hero in his story.

***

A quick blink of an eye, Jay had become a sophomore. For all those years, nothing had been able to hold them bound, until she saw Jay bleed. She had an uncanny flashback to the blood and the panic, to the distraught and the red that engulfed her that day in the abortion clinic. It was that terror that nudged her to peel the band aid and placed it on his wounds. And weirdly Jay bruised more, bled more, and burned more. The new raw burns layered over the yet-to-heal, in an unevenly grotesque pattern that each time would crinkle and blacken a bit more. They would gather because of a wound; he would tell her that he accidentally touched the boiling kettle, or burned himself in the lab, and Erica would give a slight nod of acknowledgement and leave before she vomited the words of one-part sympathy, two-part guilt caught in her throat. 

That fateful night, as Erica drowsily stepped out of her room, she was struck — currents of terror quaked her, her breaths rapid, racing to be in tune with her escalating heartbeat. No, no, it wasn't me! In the blank of unconsciousness, she staggered backwards, her arms searching frantically in the void for something to lean on. This can’t be. She hit her head on the wall, and the sound turned Jay around — who was holding a kettle of boiling water and poured directly into his arm, chunks of steam heavily dragging themselves up to the ceiling, and peels of skins meekly dragging themselves down the drain.

The bump pulled her into reality. No, no I can’t do this, leave, LEAVE. A million threads of thoughts were pulling her mind, deformed and warped — the burns weren’t mere accidents at labs; they were to make me spare what shouldn't be begged for in such a…in such a horrible way! The image of her son burning his flesh gripped her, gulping her into its film frame put on constant replay. There, she was strangled with threads of guilt and pierced with needles of self-disgust. In desperation she sealed her ears with quavering palms to quench the sizzling noise. She can’t, it’s not working, it keeps growing louder and louder and “AAAAAAAAAAH!”she let out a lung-emptying howl. She rampaged; she raved; she thrashed her arms around, wild and uncaged, so they slapped the cheeks in jerks and punched themselves on the wall until battered and blood-dyed. 

She sunk into the ground from exhaustion, panting: “I killed… twice…”. “Twice!”. In her hoarse voice, Erica faintly screeched in intermittence, hauling inaudible sounds together to form words. Disbelief consumed her; laboriously, it made her crawl towards her room to lock herself up. 

No, no, Erica, you can’t leave like that. Jay was convulsing uncontrollably and from her vision, recoiling in unfathomable pain. But there’s no sound, no noise, no screams: nothing other than agony in suppression. Just as Jay was about to pour more boiling water on his arms, no!, Erica pushed her palms down the floor to lift herself up, ran towards him with a towel on the floor, pale and possessed. In a frantic split of a second as she searched for where to touch her boy, he plunged into her embrace, spilling tears of regret and pain. For a moment, she tensed up in defence. But then she loosened herself and melted into him, pressing every ounce of her into him: it felt like home. She squeezed his body tight in her arms, her head sunk into his shoulders shaking in guilt, “I'm sorry”. And there’s nothing left but sobs and whimpers.

But the gas tank was triggered as Erica rushed towards Jay, and the towel caught fire, starting to lick onto his grandmother’s old curtain. Panicked with guilt, Jay broke off from the hug and tried to extinguish the flame with his bare hands. But Erica held him back, sealing him tighter:

“Let it burn”

*** 

The corner house on Ashland street lit up with blazing fire, and the neighbours gossipped. In the last memories of the people in this town imprinted the image of Johnson's daughter in-law and her beastly deformed son, who were standing hand in hand on the pavement in the chaos of sirens that were blending into the horns of indifferent vehicles dashing on the busy street. Old Nancy swore upon her dead husband’s grave that she saw a smile emitting from both Erica and Jay’s lips as the house was burning down right before their eyes. Reflected in their blank stares was a flame of relief that cannot be named. 

Both mother and son skipped town after the fire. Words on the street said people saw a young man with a jarring scar in the neck that resembled Jay’s in the big city but they were sure it could not possibly be Jay. 

Why?

Because on that young man’s lips was an endlessly burning and radiating beam.