The world needed to freeze. It was something that had always perplexed her, ever since she was three and the fish she had owned died. Why, when your world froze, did the rest of the world have to keep moving?

Now, however, it was far worse than losing a goldfish. It was the worst thing that could happen, and now she really couldn't understand why the world wouldn't stop for a moment. Her mum had died, and still everyone went on laughing and chatting away, posting stupid statuses on their Facebooks.

Even three years later, it still felt like she had just learned about her mum's death. Her world had stopped turning at that moment, screeched to a halt and refused to start moving again. No matter how hard she tried, the fact of the matter was that her mum was her best friend. Losing her mum was the only thing she couldn't even fearfully imagine before the shooting.

It was as though her life had been split in two and those pieces would remain distinctly separate. Before Mum and After Mum, she called them to herself. Before Mum were the happy times, the times of laughter with her and Evan. Before Mum was the time when she'd sneak files just to impress people about her knowledge of psychology, when she'd go to the park or beg her Mum to bake her biscuits.

After Mum was bleak. In fact, she could not remember the last time she had smiled. Evan had taken her to psychologist after psychologist, but she refused to speak to any of them. None of the idiots he had taken her to see were the psychologist she wanted.

That was the thing that Evan couldn't understand. He showered her with gifts, but there was only one gift she wanted. She wanted her mum back.

Molly knew what was wrong with herself. She was suffering from clinical depression. She refused to take drugs, refused to talk to anyone. She had lost all her friends gradually after her mum had died. She had stopped responding to texts, voicemails went unlistened to. She knew she was completely alone now. And that suited her just fine.

She entered the house, letting the door slam shut behind her. Evan had given up trying to tell her to stop slamming it. She did it every time she entered and left, and she would continue to do it until something drastic happened.

Molly knew that Evan wouldn't be home yet. He was working late now at his office, something she didn't really mind. Anything was better than the awkward, strained conversations with him.

The truth was, she had never really forgiven him for taking her mum off of life support. She knew her mum was fighting to wake up. She knew her mum wouldn't give up. Molly was convinced that the doctors were wrong. Their scans were wrong. The bullet had barely punctured the frontal lobe. There was no way that her mum had lost all brain activity from that.

Evan, however, had listened to the wankers. It had been a little over a month since she had been shot. He had taken her to the side and explained what was going to happen to her mum. Molly had argued profusely, but to no avail. He had already signed the paperwork, and even as he spoke to her, they were taking out the feeding tube and ventilator that had sustained her mum's life.

She sat in the room from the time the doctors left until the moment her mum died. It had taken nearly eighteen hours, but she had been there the whole time, holding her mum's hand, trying to persuade her to come back. Eventually, however, at 9.06, the telemetry monitoring her mother's heart had signalled that her heart was no longer pumping.

She had been shoed from the room at that moment, and the doctors went in to pronounce her mum dead.

Four days later, the funeral was held. Molly had not said a word to Evan in that time, hardly even acknowledging his existence. She had even refused to ride home with him, speaking one sentence to him for the first time in days. "I'm taking the bus."

Three days after her mum's funeral, her father and his fiancée had shown up to offer their condolences. Peter Drake had tried to persuade her to come live with him and Judy in Canada, but Molly met this idea with even more of a distaste than living with Evan. A slightly relieved Pete had left the very next day, not even stopping at his ex-wife's grave.

Molly threw her things on the ground, changing out of her uniform into jeans and a jumper. She always wore long sleeves now. Only Evan couldn't figure out the reason for her wanting to wear them year round, the tosser.

She turned on her stereo, the bass pumping loudly, and padded silently down the hall to a room whose door was permanently closed. She turned the handle and walked in, closing the door quietly behind her. Molly inhaled deeply, breathing in the musty scent of the room. She still could detect traces of her mother's smell, but she knew it was only her brain fooling her. Scent wouldn't last this long in the air.

A bed was in the middle of the room, made neatly. Her mum had always made her bed in the morning and tried to persuade Molly to do so as well. Molly would sometimes do it, but usually with loads of grumbling along the way.

Molly climbed onto the bed, curling up into a ball on the left side. Whenever she had a nightmare, her mother would move to the right of the bed, whispering away the nightmare as Molly clung to her tightly.

The door downstairs shut. Molly looked at the clock. Damn. He was home early. She padded silently out of her mother's room, back to hers, where the music was still blasting. She knew Evan would come up here to tell her to turn the music down in a moment. She grabbed her iPod and headphones, stuffing them in her pocket before sitting on the floor, grabbing a pencil and her sketchbook. She started to sketch, and sure enough, three minutes later, there was a knock at her door.

"Turn it down, Molls," came his voice from the other side of the door. Molly sighed, considering turning up the music louder. However, she decided against it, instead getting up and turning it off.

Molly walked down the stairs, putting the earphones in her ears and turning on her iPod at full blast. She knew from this level, Evan would be able to hear the music within ten feet. She walked out the door, ignoring his shouts from behind her. Molly walked down to the bus stop, getting on just as Evan turned the corner. She grinned as the bus started up and he was left behind, merely looking annoyed. Eventually she got off the bus and walked to where she wanted to go. Her mother's grave.

"Hey Mum," she said quietly, sitting on the grass about six feet in front of the headstone. She never liked walking through a cemetery, she knew she was walking over dead bodies and that made her uncomfortable. She sat a distance from her mum's stone, because if she sat any closer, she felt she'd be sitting on her mother.

Molly opened her sketchbook, opening to a clean page. She closed her eyes in concentration and started to sketch, letting her hand lead and her mind wander. Eventually, as it was just starting to get dark, she looked down to really see what she had drawn.

Her face was on one side of the page, the picture expertly drawn and shaded. Even the streaks of black in her hair were included. The face she had drawn looked depressed and angry, and was surrounded by smudged grey. On the other side she had drawn her and her mother together, both smiling and happy. They were hugging, and Molly was almost her mother's height. There were no smudges of grey on this side, the page around the two sketches was pristine. In the middle of the page, separating the one side from the other, was a gravestone. There was no epitaph on it, the words still waiting to be carved in.

Molly grinned, realising she had just given herself the answer to getting her mother back. The gravestone, it would have words carved in it soon.

She stood, staring at the gravestone through the twilight. "I'll see you soon Mum," she whispered, smiling to herself.

Later that night, the sketchbook lay open to that page from the graveyard, all but forgotten as the owner fell to the bed heavily, the pill bottle falling out of her hand to the floor, landing with a clatter that alerted the man downstairs that something may be wrong. He ran up the stairs, screaming her name, but she was already floating away into blackness. She was going to meet her mother. The world had stopped turning, and now, finally, so had she.

Rant