Sucker Punch

by Sofia Schwaiger

The day I knocked my mother’s teeth out was the worst day of my life. I woke up early that morning to wake my sister up for school. My mom was asleep in her bed, a half-smoked cigarette sat burnt out on her bedside table, the lingering scent of tobacco engulfed the room. The TV was turned on and a dull murmur of words from the people on the news echoed throughout the tiny house.

As I made breakfast for my sister, the milk came out of the carton in chunks.

“Great.” I muttered to myself. My sister slowly walked into the kitchen, still in her pajamas.

“Is Mom still asleep? She said she’d drive me to school today,” she sounded defeated as she spun her spoon around in her milkless cereal bowl.

When I was younger, my dad always told me I had a tendency to act now and think later, which was a habit I never fully grown out of. Before I knew it words were falling out of my mouth without thinking.

“You know she’s like this–” I stopped myself.

Mar was too young to understand, stuck in a fairytale full of hope that one day my mom would wake up and be our mother again instead of a distant figure who lives alongside us.

“I know, but she promised,” she whined.

She picked herself up from the table and left the room to get ready for school.

As I pulled up to the middle school, I heard Mar’s seat belt unbuckle. She grabbed her books from under her seat and began to open the door.

“You can just let me out here.”

I stopped the car and let Mar run out. On my way out of the parking lot, my phone started buzzing in my back pocket.  I slammed on the breaks of the car and pulled out my phone.

Incoming Call: Mom.

Trying to get to school, I avoided the notifications and continued driving until I got a wave of calls and texts from my mom.

“I’m dropping Mar off right now, what’s up?” I said.

“Come home,” she demanded.

“Good one, Mom. I have stuff to do, I have to go to school,” I said reluctantly.

“I already called you out for the day, come home.”

I thought about it for a moment and then drove straight home. I thought of what she could’ve been planning, if she wanted to spend a day with me and be my mom again. My palms were sweaty as I held onto the steering wheel. There was a part of me, too, that was living in a fairytale.

The TV was still blaring when I walked inside, the house was cold, and empty. I went into my mom’s room. It reminded me of when I was little, my mom used to pull me out of school from time to time without my dad knowing and we would spend hours watching movies all day. She never fully accepted reality.

She pulled out a cigarette from her bedside table, lit it and turned her head to me, “You want one?” The small room started to fill with a thin layer of smoke. I hated the smell of cigarettes.

I shook my head, “I don’t smoke."

She looked over at me, her face struck with confusion as if she couldn’t fathom a world where I, her own daughter, wouldn’t take cigarette from her. She lifted her cigarette away from her chapped lips and blew the smoke into my face.

When I was thirteen, my mom told me, “You’re not useful until you’re old enough to buy me a pack of cigarettes.” Every time she would light one, that was all I could think about.

The whole day with her was like suspending into an alternate universe I didn’t belong in. And I felt like if I made one wrong move, I would disrupt space and time and the world would be set out of balance. I tip-toed around conversation and jumped over obstacles with her. She was a ticking time bomb and I was the stray match.

I sat idly on her bed as my my mom filed through her clothes. Her room was littered with shoes, dresses were draped all over the bed.

“I think I’m going out tonight.” She turned around and faced me, grinning wide and guilty.

I had nothing to say to her.

She left soon after that and didn’t come home until hours later. Right before midnight I told Mar to go to bed. And almost on queue, my mom came in through the back door with her shoes dangling in her left hand, and a cigarette in the other. As she spoke to me, scents of booze started to pour out of her mouth with every incomprehensible word. The cigarette burned slowly as she made her way through the doorway into the kitchen. My back was turned to her.

“Sel, I have raised you to be such an independent woman,” she muttered her words, clearly not paying attention to them. The staining musk of the cigarette smoke consumed the room. She looked down at me with her once doting brown eyes.“It’s like all the hard work really payed off,” she looked pleased with herself, “It was just so worth it, to see you grow up like this,” she declared to me in the voice of a drunk diplomat.

What she said was so absurd, I almost began to laugh. As if she actually believed she could make up for all the times she had called me with twice-removed excuses and dismissed my problems for hers.

“Mom, you haven’t raised me to be anything. This isn’t how I wanted to grow up and Mar doesn’t deserve this either–”

My words came to a halt and suddenly she was right in front of me, and we were both screaming at each other over the loud TV that was still blaring from my mom’s room since that morning. It was easy to convince myself that she was what I needed to fix something in my life, when I had been fine without her all along. I was acting before thinking. I couldn’t even hear myself think over the noise of the TV.

A content look set across my mother’s face, she had been waiting to fight with me. She loved to pick a fight.

“It’s not my fault you don’t appreciate everything I do for you,” she grunted.

She lifted her cigarette to the edges of her lips, inhaled and exhaled. The smoke brushed up against my face, and I unwillingly took it in. I hated cigarettes, and I couldn’t believe she had just said that. Everything she did for me? How could she have the audacity to attempt to take credit for making me into who I was?

Before I knew it, I was lifting up my right fist as if I had finally been granted permission to use it. I hit my mom’s unfamiliar warm face with my white knuckles. Something inside me stopped at the first punch, while a part of me wanted to continue. I could hardly process what I had done until I saw the blood as it dribbled down through the cracks of her fingers that caressed the bottom of her face. Blood fell onto the floor in drops that resembled hot wax. I will never be able to forget the look on her face, as she cupped her hands to her mouth. Her eyes jolting up at me, a dead stare. The room was quiet even over the muted roar of the TV and the constant barking of the dog, the house fell silent.

It was 2am and I couldn’t allow myself to put the events in order. I desperately attempted to assemble the facts and embellished stories I had made up in my head and the brightly lit urgent care room didn’t help.

It was hard to avoid the truth in the cramped confines of that small hospital room. I reached over onto the small bedside table and grabbed the remote. I turned on the TV and turned up the volume until the room was filled with the meaningless words of a rerun of an old show. We sat alongside each other, not speaking but waiting. My mom turned towards me, her hand still up against her cheek, gauze hanging out of her mouth,

“Sel, we left Mar at home.”