My Evil Mother: A Short Story

By that time, I’d finished university and left my mother’s house. My departure was not amicable: she was bossy, she was spying on me, she was treating me like a child! Those were my parting words. “Suit yourself, my pet,” she’d said. “When you need help, I’ll be here. Shall I donate your old stuffed animals to charity?” A pang shot through me. “No!

I still believed that my mother had some influence over the Universe. I’d been brought up to believe it, and it’s hard to shake such ingrained mental patterns. “You’re so mean!” I said. I was, however, eating the cookie: oatmeal raisin, baked yesterday, one of her staples. “The opposite of ‘mean’ is ‘doormat,’” she said.

If she wants to, my mother said; she had a way of talking about me to others as if I couldn’t hear.