I thought you, as readers, might be interested in this. I took a lot of the same themes from this fic and tweaked them for a creative writing class I took. The following is the final result. And, as a result, I think I've fully exhausted the girl-kills-mother storyline. Finally.
Truth, like morality, is a relative affair: there are no facts, only interpretations. There was her truth and his truth and their truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.
But then again, there wasn't.
Her Truth
The intimate sounds of breakfast being prepared gradually pulled her out of sleep. At first, the monotonous hum of her industrial microwave and the irregularity of a wooden spoon beating against the sides of an aluminum mixing bowl permeated her dreams. The noises deepened as did the stifling smell of an overzealous toaster creating a burnt metallic atmosphere. Thirty-nine seconds before her alarm would give way to violent buzzing, the microwave's ding of completion thoroughly awoke Julia Pearson.
She felt immediately uneasy, as if she had woken up with sea sickness while on dry land. The crackle of resistance from the eggs as they were poured into a frying pan landed a blow of sharp recognition: no one had cooked breakfast in her house for five years.
In her subsequent attempts to identify the offender – quickly ruling out her alcoholic mother and dead father – she hesitantly recalled the evenings of the previous month and how she had begun to share her childhood bed with Matty, her ambiguous boyfriend of almost four years. The bed sheets felt worn under her fingers as she slid her hand to the side of the bed he typically occupied and confirmed that the spot had cooled in the hours he had been gone. Her frail fingers clutched the sheets as nausea threatened to overwhelm her. As she rested her head back on the limp pillow, the alarm began to sound.
Now no longer able to hide under the guise of sleep, she reluctantly pulled her body out of bed, wearing only an oversized t-shirt with the printed logo of the prominent college that she nearly attended. Attempting to prolong the inevitable morning discussion, she stole into the bathroom, admitting defeat as she splashed cold water over her reddened face. She ran her chewed finger nails through her unwashed hair, allowing them to wax slick with excess oil, and over the misshaped splotches camouflaging her freckles. A half-drank tumbler of scotch, the final remains of last night's unwarranted binge, was sitting on the edge of the sink, next to their toothbrushes. Shielding her eyes from her reflection, she polished it off in a single swig.
When she entered the kitchen, however, it wasn't her bed partner standing over the sizzling stove. "Mom?"
Her mother spun on her heels, her hand over her heart for affect. "Jesus, Julia, you scared me silly!" she exclaimed with a southern accent as faux as it was novel. She smiled at her daughter, but the girl noticed it was not without malice. "I was just making y'all breakfast. A big 'ole Texas omelet. Matt here was telling me how he'd never had real, down home country cooking."
Julia narrowed her eyes, unsure if she should expose her mother's obviously fraudulent behavior in front of her guest, sitting mere feet away at the kitchen table. He preemptively calmed the room by hurriedly asking her if she wanted anything from the store.
She loosened her gaze on her mother, who had turned back towards the frying pan, and glancing sidelong towards the kitchen table. "I'm sorry, the store?"
He stared up at her, although she didn't meet his gaze. "The grocery store. We're going to get some Texas toast." A barely audible noise of disgust followed from her, so he quickly added, "And orange juice. Breakfast food."
Her mother, raising her voice to be heard over the searing mess in the frying pan, furthered that they were having "french toast and omelets, Shug."
Her voice caught in her throat as she tried to explain that her mother had never even been to Texas, so she shook her head and promptly surrendered the argument. She started towards the table, but he had already begun to unfold his limbs from the folding chair he was in. "Matt," Julia whispered, "you don't have to…"
Looking from mother to daughter, he sighed and pressed his face into the hair above her ear as he whispered, "I can't be the middle of this."
She slumped against a flimsy cabinet while he carefully closed the door behind him. Her mother, unaware, hummed the tune to a twangy country song that hadn't been played on the radio in 15 years. Drawing in as much air as she could, Julia managed to question her mother. "Why did you do that?"
The humming broke off as her mother glanced over her shoulder towards the empty kitchen table. "Now, where did that boy run off to? Don't tell me you ran him out."
"I believe that was you." Her voice was filled not with the resentment of a mistreated child but the quiet discomfort that clung to her every move. "But, the breakfast, Mom," Julia said, her voice cracking once, betraying her wounded state. Her mother lowered herself into the folding chair, ignoring the billowing smoke rising in dark circles. "That was his breakfast. He made that breakfast on each of my birthdays. Even the day he died, it was the last meal he cooked." Julia had wandered to the stove and let her hands slide over the knobs on the stove. She flicked them off one by one as the overwhelming aroma of burnt toast and half-cooked egg filled her nose and mouth.
Her mother let her head drop for a second but recovered abruptly. "Now, Julia, I was just trying to be nice to your guest."
The girl didn't turn around when she heard her mother's patent-leather pumps clacking across the kitchen tile, smiling to herself only that the episode was almost comical. "When the going gets tough, my mom sure does get going," she whispered to the linoleum. She began to scrape the crusted edges of egg and let the runny mess fall into the trash.
It wasn't only on her birthday that her father cooked his signature Texas-style omelets, but even the smaller occasions, the ones her mother would forget about. The day he died, he had cooked it for her graduation. They had eaten it alone, in near silence due to the nausea with which Julia was suffering. Facing an unknown future, Julia was agonizing over a convocation ceremony where she would remain publicly unrecognized and a graduation party where only a handful of people would bother to show up. Her dawn expectations remained unfulfilled.
She met Matt that night, as a friend of a friend, one of a hundred guests drawn by the overemphasized grandeur and the added incentive of free alcohol. Her father waved his hand dismissively when Julia suggested the party was getting too large for their modest tudor. He proudly wrapped an arm tightly around her shoulders and told her that it wasn't because of where she had been that they were celebrating, but it was where she was going. She gave a half-smile, all too aware that most were only celebrating her acquisition of a keg, but kissed her beaming father nonetheless.
Two hundred people filtered through the house, filling red Solo cups and glassware made of plastic. She wasn't sure she knew two hundred people, but there they were in black and white, spooning out extra helpings of potato salad and stepping carefully over her tulips. She stood by her father obediently as middle-aged couples complimented her on her choice of college or remarked how lucky she was that the rain had held off for her "big day." She smiled and bore it all – every last platitude – and her father made mention of his gratitude after each Westchester and Davis ambled away.
Once the potato salad, and crowd, started thinning, he motioned for her to follow him into the house. "I left your gift on the bedside table in my bedroom so you wouldn't inadvertently stumble upon it." She trailed him up the stairs, tracing her finger along a continuous streak of dirt that had been forming on the raised wall for months. She glanced at the back of her father, his broad shoulders bending slightly as his breathing became shallower, harder. Her mother's blossoming alcoholism was doing little to help his failing heart. She thrust out her arm instinctively to catch him when he faltered for a moment at the top of the stairs, but he smiled and shook his head, assuring her that he didn't need her help. "I'm the dad, okay, kid? I take care of you." As if to prove himself, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to the top of the stairs, then led her down the hall.
Indeed, a failing heart does not take well to surprises nor does a husband take well to catching his wife in bed with another man. Father and daughter stood muted by the scene in front of them as wife and mother hastily tried to shield and excuse herself from her explicit misdeed. Once her eyes had focused, Julia recognized the man hurrying back into his all-black ensemble as her childhood priest, the only other man she had ever called "Father." Her shoulders began to buckle as the weight of her father was gradually transferred onto her back. Turning to him, she saw his eyes glaze. "I need to lie down." Pushing off of the door frame, he headed into his daughter's bedroom.
Julia looked back at the half-dressed couple, waiting despite her father's obviously tempestuous state. As her priest walked towards her, she held up her hand and lowered her eyes. "You," she looked between the priest and her mother, "taught me everything I know. I can't, I don't know where to begin to forgive this."
Matt's socked feet were sinking into the plush carpet lining the stairs as he ascended, at first to naively search out the nearest facilities but becoming absorbed in the episode of familial drama that he began to witness even before he finished ascending the stairs.
Julia only wanted to see her father, feel his heart beat even faster than hers yet whisper all of the clichés he could muster. It will all be okay.
Matt bent his neck slightly to catch a priceless glimpse of his priest, standing dumbfounded behind the cracked image of the school nurse adjusting her aged support bra. He turned away, afraid he would soon lose control of his gag reflex.
Julia watched her father disappear into the shadows of the bedroom she had spent seventeen years outgrowing.
Matt saw the girl, one he had only seen in passing before, fly into the open door of another bedroom. The meager light from the hall caught the excess glitter on her dishwater blonde and party dress as if she had dressed not for her graduation but for her First Holy Communion. He followed the sparkles into the bedroom where the girl fell into his arms as if by instinct. Without speaking a word, he knew.
He used his free hand to shade his eyes from the glowing light coming through the window. He shaded his eyes to see the legacy of a man, lying face down on his daughter's pink bedspread.
Six years later, after letting the lukewarm tap water carry the evidence of a crime too heinous to speak of into the bowels of the sink, Matt returned with arms lain with groceries, and she, again, fell into his arms as if by instinct.
This time, though, he had no idea why.
His Truth
"You remember what you called me those first few months?" he asked as she unpacked the stiff brown bags. "Mr. Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Do you remember that?"
She didn't turn around. "Something like that."
"Well, I do. I remember. Mr. Wrong, you know, you don't forget something like that." She began breakfast a new, cracking the dozen eggs against the sides of a chipped mixing bowl. "Mr. W-r-o-n-g, that's me." His hands slid over the linoleum countertop, being halted only by miniscule particles of yesterday's dinner.
"Do you want me to apologize, Matt?" She was valiantly scouring away the remains of her mother's earlier attempts at breakfast.
"Apologize? No, it's fine. It's just something I was thinking about, remembering. Where's your mom?"
Julia just snorted – just like that, like some barnyard animal that doesn't chew its cud. His eyes widened, remembering the noises that escaped her lips the night before and tried to juxtapose them with her snort. His eyes fell to the area of darkness between the floor and the cabinets.
Not wanting to broach the subject again, he tried to recall even the most mundane events from his grocery trip. "There's a bit of a chill today – fall's threatening our perfect summer nights."
She casually lifted one of her shoulders and let it drop. "Fall has a way of doing that." She dropped the utensils in a clamor into the metal bowl and used her hands to choke her now-mousy hair into a mess behind her head. Satisfied, she returned to the dirty dishwater.
"Yea, that it does, I figure." His fingers ran anxiously along the veins in his forearm as he continued to babble. "I saw Father Andrew at the store getting some flowers for his sister. I've been hearing that she's pretty sick."
She ripped the skin off a week-old onion and slammed it against the cracking wooden cutting board. A sharpened knife sliced through it; two halves were thus formed, yet the whole had vanished. The boy slipped his hands over her arms and guided her movements until they became swift, clear. The stench of onion became too powerful for anything – even the basil and thyme – to combat. Her chopping slowed, tentatively, as she focused on producing equal slices. His arms fell back to his sides, and he watched patiently as she wielded the knife like a chisel, carving long J's into the layers.
When the onion had thoroughly dissipated into small slices, she released her grip on the black handle and turned to tease the tuft of his hair that was flirting with the collar of his jacket. She nodded to herself and kept her eyes focused on an unknown point behind his hip. "Fine, then," she said as if it were an admission he had been torturing over for years, "I killed her."
Their Truth
Truth, like morality, is a relative affair: there are no facts, only interpretations. There was her truth and his truth and their truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.
But then again, there wasn't.
Truth couldn't exist in the dead body lying on her living room floor, morality either. Moral implications were better left to her father – not the one who laid dead on her graduation night but her moral father, the father of all morality with the autonomous power of the cross and the collar. That power reverberated through her as she let the body grow cold, trying to articulate a morality that would allow her to kill her mother.
Somehow, in the convoluted disorder of motivations, she had to present one to herself before the anguish would cease.
The sky had darkened to a deep blue before Matt spoke again. He had lost control over his muscles when he saw her hand, wedding ring intact, limply gripping the carpet, the faint metallic odor of her congealed blood hardly detectable over the pungent oils of her foreign perfume. Never taking his gaze off of the body, he crawled into the corner until he was overcome by the fatigue of keeping his eyes open.
When he opened them again, she was resting on her crossed-legs beside him and her palms were flattened against the hardwood. "I was so, so scared," she offered.
"Scared?" He leaned against the antique mahogany dresser to hold himself up.
A brief nod and a bit lip replaced further confession from her.
The silence remained as thick as the restlessness. The air had swelled with blood until breathing was a chore and the October wind sneaking through a cracked window stung their eyes. It danced over their chapped lips and deprived them of moisture with every inhalation. A particularly sharp gust caused Julia to cough against the back of her hand. Accepting her defeat, she relented. "It was a pang, a flash."
Turmoil coursed through his body, but he managed to collect his thoughts in order to reply. "What?"
She answered, "It wasn't accumulating. Just a pang, like hunger, but only, it was to murder. The confusion that has persisted for six years, the muddle of hurt and anger and, yes, fear… The inextricable blend – as unrelenting as it was avoidable – they were all a lost tomorrow. Emotions were consumed in other emotions, as they were always being kneaded into me, becoming an integral part of my existence, becoming more me than anything I could think or do or say. And it all came out in a pang; everything was released in the briefest moment. There was a pinch and then I was, in my hand there was a knife, and it cut into her skin so perfectly. Her skin fell into it, and the knife kneaded it, like the prep work for a beautiful sculpture. The valve was finally released in that moment, but it was too late: her eyes were already drained."
Letting all of the air out of his lungs for the first time since her initial confession, he pulled away and muttered, "Jesus, Jules." A brief lull, but Julia waited, unable to interrupt. "I've brought a knife to a gun fight here. My thoughts cannot possibly hold the loaded implications of your words. Nothing. There is nothing to say or even to think. Nothing."
She interposed that "this never was anything but an exercise in articulation."
He shrugged. "Sure. My articulation is for naught, though. It's more than there's nothing to say and all previous words have been voided. There's nothing to say because there's nothing to know. Knowledge and emotions were so vast, and now…. Void. A felled void. Like a black hole, all of the matter and thoughts and genius I've ever encountered has collided into an extreme nothingness. The elusiveness of clarity is pressing into my skin. I can barely even speak about it."
She crossed her arms over her bare legs so that the metal ring on her right hand began to form a dent in the puffy skin above her kneecap. "You'll have your pang. Well, eventually. Mine took six years."
He glanced over at her then back at her mother's body. "You don't even seem deterred by it. You're speaking of concrete, of reality, of meaning, but there is none."
She interjected, her voice rising above the whisper they have both unwittingly adopted for the past seven hours – "This happened, Matt! This is concrete and it's reality, and…" she trailed off.
"It's truth?" he offered.
Her mouth hung slack, but her wisdom teeth still managed to chew the flesh of her cheek. Her head fell slowly to a bow against her trembling hands. A sharp breath was drawn in and, "Yea. Someone's truth. Her truth."
He looked over at her again, but he didn't look away immediately. "Ours can be different."
Her head, yielding to her intense fatigue, slid onto his lap. "How?" she questioned.
"My pang, J. Confess."
She raised her eyes to meet his then looked at the corpse, the blue veins contrasted against translucent skin, dried blood spotting a line down to her bellybutton. Anticipating the answer to her unvoiced question, her eyes roamed but never left the body. "Alright, I tell him. And then what? Confusion, inanition, an anarchical center of existence?"
"What do you want?" he finally asked.
Another question, another sigh. True, it wasn't doing either of them much good, but she responded obediently, albeit with a single word. "Morality."
"Simple enough, no? Something is wrong, or something is right. You can rationalize any behavior, any action, any whim of any person. Morality, your shiny pinch out of the nonsense of your mind that leaves you unable to deny that there is a right way. Your big fucking sign post, no? Your pang. That's where your morality is."
A scoffing, "you have no idea what my pang is," was her only tired rebuttal. After a long episode of staring at the deceased, Julia shook her head in surrender. "Yea. I'll confess."
And Nothing but the Truth
She had recited the words a hundred times but still nothing. She knew she had to submit herself to judgment, prostrate herself, and she knew there was a form. Everything in its proper place, in life, in death, even in denial.
But as the apologies flung at her from across the threshold and she waited impatiently for her turn to speak, she could only recall the words of a nursery rhyme from her childhood. "Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee…"
Instead of registering her distracted state, the man in the collar was ceremoniously and repeatedly confronting past travesties. His breathing labored as he sifted through motivation and treason; her mind, all the while, was replacing the needle on the tireless soundtrack. "…They went to the church, and married was she…"
Across the inhibiting partition, he began to cry. She tried to rid herself of the final lyrics so she could focus on the form and structure of her own confession, but the rhyme continued despite her. "…The fly has married the bumblebee!"
Showing little signs of letting up – the crying and the soundtrack – Julia relented. "Father, please stop. Nothing is coming out of this. Your motivations, they aren't unusual. They aren't new. Lust and danger have enticed man since the beginning."
"What I did was wrong." He said it without hesitating, calm authority punctuating each word. "And I am truly sorry for hurting you and your family. Nothing can erase the pain I caused, and I don't expect it to. I just want you to know that I am aware of the wrongness of my actions."
She gripped the armrests on the heavy mahogany chair and leaned closer to the partition, closer to the priest. "But how do you know it's wrong? How are you so certain?" His body deflated with his lungs in a theatrical sigh. "The thing," she continued, "I liked best about you was that you chose reality over tradition. You never called me 'child' or gave me prayer penances or anything like that. And that's how I learned to buck structure, and that's why my thoughts never focus. But even when I wasn't focusing, I was checking myself against a code of morality, always. It wasn't always structured properly, and I didn't always do what I knew was right, but I had it. And now I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life alone in a jail cell, and I want to know why. I want to know why I stopped checking myself and maybe how to get back to that place where I know, with complete certainty, what I should do."
She paused to take a breath, so he used it to his advantage and cut her off. "I've known you since you were born. I baptized you. You were the third babe I ever baptized, in fact. Julia May Pearson, I'll never forget how loud you screamed when I poured the water over your head." The girl's audible fidgeting caught him off guard. "Am I boring you?"
A yawn escaped her, and she chuckled nervously in a vain attempt to cover it up. "No. Well, alright, yes, but I don't know. Facts – cold and hard and factual as they are – have no place in the hectic swarm of thoughts. Essentially, the only thing that has any merit is pure, and facts aren't pure, by definition. They're riddled with interpretations and accounts and articulations. We might be way past foregone conclusions, but purity exists only when articulation does not." She slumped in her chair, defeated by her own articulations and accounts; their existence alone marking her unwarranted mediation.
"Then why did you come to talk to me? By your very definitions, if I had something to teach you or show you about structuring your morality, it would not be through words. How would I do it? How do I begin to rebuild that structure?"
"It would be through a pang," she answered.
He gently pulled his sleeve free from the metal hinge it had gotten caught on. "A what now?" he asked distractedly.
"The pangs – like a moment of clear direction in the jumble of motivation that's coursing through me all the time. Not an epiphany, really, something more driven. It's doing something before you can even think to do it. It's completely primal – it's pure human interaction, unchanged and undeterred by human thought."
"And these pangs, you follow them? You commit what they demand of you?"
Her eyes, dulled by the darkness trapping her in the confessional, startling rose to the ceiling as realization panged her. "Yes," she choked out. Her desire for human contact overwhelmed her, but she was blocked from touching even the hand of the priest because of the unvented divider between them. She blindly felt for the curtain leading back to the sanctuary and bounded towards the pews. He was strong for his age and managed to catch her a beat after she had left the confessional. She dug her fists into his chest, slowly losing control of her movements until he lowered her into one of the back pews.
They passed the next few minutes in near silence, only interrupted by the dry sobbing of the girl folding into herself in the hard wood. "It's always been there," she eventually managed. "It's been there in another structure, but I've been ignoring it."
He knew her fate all too well, so he allowed her to mourn in silence. Sobs hiccupped through her body. "It's enough just to know…" She began to explain but trailed off. It was enough now just to know. It was enough to let the guilt wash over her, course through her, become her in a way she had never known. She left the enlightenment unvoiced, but she admitted to herself that what she did was unequivocally wrong.
But, then again, it wasn't.