I don't own Sailor Moon, well I guess you can't have it all right?
This is an Usagi thought-centric fic about her mother's pattern of behavior. Co-written with SomeoftheFame who also proof read this and told me it wasn't a dumb idea.
Mama throws fits. There two kinds of fits, the same type, but triggered differently. One almost always had to do with our schoolwork, if I brought home a failing grade I could expect a fit. The others usually ran like clockwork and you could expect them to happen every two or three months, with shortening density in the summer months when the sweltering heat kept my brother and I in the air conditioned shelter of our home.
My brother, Shingo, and I always gathered in the living room; myself to our three seated couch while he laid in the center of the floor, both of us cooling ourselves with a fan made out of folded paper. The muggy air labored every breath and sweat poured like water from the rich wells that were our glands.
Shingo turned the television to some Saturday afternoon cartoon, or was it Friday? Summer days had a tendency to run together like colors bleeding in a washing machine. Time actually became marked by when mama got this almost anxious look in her eye. It started slow with just a look.
Her eyes darkened like storm clouds overtaking a blue sky. She walked past the living room and constantly craned her neck to look in where Shingo and I sat like mindless zombies, driven hapless by heat waves. She did this over and over again, like we didn't notice her rubbernecking, gawking at us, at our terrible inactivity. The heat turned her cheeks red and caused her hair to frizz out, but no amount of comical appearance could mask that anxious look glossing over her eyes.
The second symptom of her fits went on a week or two before she actually had her fit. Chocolate began to disappear from every corner of the house. Leftover holiday candy that had been stewing for months in our off-white fridge was gone. A packet of chocolate and peanut butter cups bought to cure papa's occasional sweet tooth were gone. The only evidence that they had ever existed were the wrappers filling up the trash. Mama was the culprit, the candy thief, the chocolate caper, but none of us; not Shingo, me, or papa would say anything. A kind of fear pervaded the household approaching her fit.
This one in particular was a Monday (or a Sunday?) and we had been waiting for it all week. Papa sat in an armchair with one foot on the floor and the other resting horizontally so his ankle touched his knee while he read the paper. Shingo and I managed to share the couch, the heat making it too unbearable to bicker like we normally would. He fell asleep stretched out beside me in his underwear with a manga book open on his chest. I was flipping through the channels while a small oscillating fan turned beside me. It was too small and dirty with dust and hair to do any good, but the constant whirring was oddly comforting.
Mama had been leaning back in a chair to the right of the couch for the last hour, eyes glinting with that familiar anxiousness, a book she hadn't started reading in her lap. All of a sudden she stood and her chair scraped against the floor over the whirl of the fan. It was a simple sound, a chair scooting against the floor, but it might as well have been a gunshot.
Papa was an expert at reading the newspaper. By that I mean he knew how to hold the pages up without them bending, creasing, or having his hand cramp from holding it oddly. He brought the pages together with calm precision when he needed to the page and nothing broke his focus. He was in the middle of turning the page when mama stood and he ripped a large tear into the page.
Shingo snapped out of his heat daze nap, his book tumbling onto the floor, as he jolted up in fear. I lowered the remote, giving up on my search for something to watch as mama moved to the center of the living room in direct view of her zombified-by-July children. She was a short woman and her green shirt contrasted her bushy blue hair. She took a moment to look at both of us. I could see Shingo tense under her gaze, but when her eyes met mine I had to cut off a laugh brewing in my throat.
With her hands on her hips, anxiety bouncing in her eyes, hair bushy and frizzed by the heat, she could have been an overworked librarian. Her eyes caught my humor and that's when the fit came.
All those anxious, almost worried looks, the magically disappearing chocolate, it all exploded out of her in a rage of words and motion. She stomped her foot hard enough to rattle the television behind her and make a family photo on the entertainment system shake.
"I've had it! I just can't stand it any longer, watching my children sit here having their brains turned to putty by that TV! Day after day, wasting their lives!"
Her arms waved like she was attempting to flag down an airplane. "How can you sit there and do nothing while the sun is out there shining away on your summer?" she stomped her foot again and this time the house shook.
The stand beside the couch wobbled and my fan fell over to the side. It started clicking in error as it was unable to complete its oscillation route.
Shingo raised his hand like he was scared to answer a question in school. "But it's really, really, hot outside. It's at least a little cooler in here."
"You can't stay inside every second of every day can you? My children turned into lumps on the couch because of a little heat? This TV is rotting you!" Mama's voice sounded both desperate and outraged, as heated as the July sun. "You need culture! You don't get it from a TV, you get it from concerts, ballets, theaters, real theaters with real actors!" Her voice started to crack, concrete splitting under the weight of time and the shift of plates.
"This stupid TV!" She whipped around and stomped towards the television. A picture of the four of us fell from its place beside the television and my family's face hit the floor. Mama stopped at an arm's length from the television. She blinked through a few different emotions; desperation, anxiety, murder fading from her dark eyes. She glanced to Shingo and I again before she picked up the frame and wiped it off. She replaced the frame on the system, glass face intact, and turned to us. "I'm sorry." Her voice was small now, sad, devoid of the embers of rage.
She walked back and sat in her chair. She folded a strand of her hair behind her ear and grabbed her book that fell to the floor before she cracked it open and started reading.