Her Spot on the Wall
He sits at the table, not even noticing the beer in his hand anymore. She watches from her usual spot, eyeing him even more closely than usual. Something about him has changed, she muses, but she can't pinpoint it. Something is here that wasn't there when she knew him last, when he still listened to her. He got taller, his hair grew, his clothes got dirtier . . . but something else changed too.
He used to look up to her. When he was little he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She loved it when he asked her if he could touch her long dark hair, finger the makeup she used to outline her dark eyes with, play with the powder she used to whiten her pale skin. He thought she looked like a dark angel, but not a scary one. The rest of his family was scary, but not her.
Now he can't even look at her without curling his lip, without flashing his eyes. He doesn't think she's beautiful anymore. Her thick hair is stained with gray, her eyes surrounded by wrinkles. There isn't a mirror in her hallway but she knows how ugly she's become. That must be why he never talks to her anymore.
They always used to talk. He loved to brag about the pranks he played at school, the friends he'd made, the love notes he'd receive. He would laugh at them, laugh and tell her how stupid he thought the girls at school were being, how weird they kept acting. She never did know if they stopped being stupid or weird, because after that first year he stopped talking to her. He finally realized what the rest of his family was really like, what she was really like. His dark eyes, dark like his mother's, finally opened.
She must have tortured him. She and the rest of their family. That must have been why he ran away. He got to the point where he couldn't stand any of them, including her. She screamed at him as he left, telling him he'd never be welcomed back. That he'd ruined the family, which was all he was supposed to care about. What people thought of the family was suppose to be the most important thing.
But who cares about the family when half of themare dead and the other half are slowly dying, slowly breaking off? It's only a matter of time until the pure ones are impure; until everything the family stands for is gone. Look at what's happened to her. The only heir to their precious family name hates them all, including the name, and she can't do anything about it. Because she's stuck on that stupid wall and he won't even talk to her.
She really wishes he'd talk to her, as she watches him sit at the table, not even noticing the beer in his hand is about to spill all over the expensive table cloth she never let them eat on. She knows if she'd tell him to watch out he'd jerk and spill the beer anyway and get up and rip the curtain in front of her and she'd be stuck looking at moldy cloth until someone bumped into it and it moved a bit and she'd have a little peephole to look through, to make sure nothing bad happens to her house and her heirlooms. Because those are suppose to be all she cares about, that's what it means to be a good Black, to make sure nothing happens to the things that matter. Like purity and making sure your name is well-known—those are the things that are suppose to matter.And those heirlooms are suppose to be everything the Black name stands for. Because family is everything and she wishes he'd accept that . . .
So as he sits there and as she watches him, her son, she realizes nothing about him has changed; he's been like that all her life and she's been too stupid and blind and selfish to realize that. And she closes her eyes and hopes for the best before she calls out to him, tells him not to spill his drink, and he jerks his arm and the white table cloth is streaked with brown and he stands up and storms over to her spot on the wall and jerks the curtain in front of her eyes so she can't look at him anymore, and so he doesn't have to look at her. And she can smell the mold in the curtain and she can hear his retreating footsteps and she tries to remember the last time she told him she loved him.