This is a bit like a bunch of drabbles sort of cobbled together to make one story, so please bear with me that they are short. Happy reading! Please review!
His mother cooked.
Every morning. Every night. She said she had been doing it since she was a girl, when she cooked for her Maman and Papa. If this was true, the boy certainly found no evidence of it. His mother's cooking was heavy and greasy. She had been good once, when she was still young and pretty. Before his father had lost his dream of priesthood, before the boy.
'You never told me,' Papa chewed out, pushing his plate away. 'You never told me getting fat and ugly would make you a bad cook, too.'
Maman stared evenly at her plate. She ate the same thing every night. They all did. Thin broth and burnt, crusty black bread. Forego the butter, that was Papa's, and slather everything in lard. They drank water or milk on most nights, tea on Sunday. The boy bit his lip nervously, trying to disappear into his rickety chair. Peering out from behind a curtain of dirty white hair, he watched Papa stare down Maman, sucking his teeth and muttering to her.
'Useless, disgusting thing. Give me a filthy creature for a son. Un fantôme!'
And then Maman would bow her head, eyes of the floor. He switched his gaze between the two - Papa, big, furious, his brown eyes glued to his wife, and Maman, with her delicate nose and careworn face, chewing her bread as though this was her last meal.
But, Papa was not finished yet.
'Tu as un putain,' he hissed, and the boy could hear his mother's choked sobs. 'Vous donnez me cette chose misérable, c'anormal, et vous s'asseyant sur votre cul paresseux toute la journée!'
Maman stood to clear the plates, and Papa stood to make himself a bother. The boy ate silently still, observing, as he did every night. Somewhere in the far corners of his mind, he knew he was at fault for all of this. Mea culpa. He drank his tea. Mea maxima culpa.
'Nettoyez ces plats, femme.'
She never would learn to be fast enough.
Next minute, Papa had upset the table, and with it, the boy's dinner. He dropped to the floor, ignoring the feet of his parents, Maman scampering to the cabinets, Papa looming over her, shouting abuse in his loud, Northern accent. There was food on the floor, and that was the concern of the moment. He pressed his face to the rough wood, oblivious to the pushing and shoving, the shards of glass dotting the ground like bits of fallen snow. It did not matter now if the boy cut his tongue, or was stepped on, or was hit by the chair his Papa now held in the air.
There was food on the ground, and he was hungry.
He picked the crumbs with his fingernails, licking them from his grimy skin as though they contained the solution to all of his problems. Papa's greasy steak had fallen, surrounded by broth and rice. The boy licked each floorboard, his tongue protesting at each splinter of wood. He licked his lips, took Papa's plate, and licked that too. Next came Maman's, and then the pottery cups, and the flatware. Above him, Papa had taken the broom from the Eastern Wall, and Maman pleaded with him to stop.
'Il est une fantôme!'
His stomach complained that it was empty still, but the boy paid it no heed. Righting the table, he crawled beneath it to sit cross-legged on the floor, eyes red as the burns on his fingers.
He thought of the mirror, of the reflection that stared back each visit. Wretched. It made him feel ill, to think of his face. Skinny and pale and revolting. He loathed himself, truly - down to the last millimetre. The sound of a slap above and his mother's whimpering drew the boy's face to the wood floor. He imagined the slap had hit his face instead, and flinched.
Soon, the noise faded, and Maman fled to the bedroom. The boy remained under his table until Papa had departed with a vicious kick that struck his shins.
All night he stayed there, the tabletop a sturdy roof above his gleaming white head, curled into a tight ball on the cold floor. He forgot about Maman and Papa. He forgot his face in the mirror, the daemon's face that stared out from he glass. He forgot that he was seven and small and skinny.
Celestin Moreau was nothing more than a ghost.