Monsters Got Blamed for Murder, So I Relived the Victim's Last Hour novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: Her Mother's Kitchen

I came home on Sunday morning at seven with my bulldog clip in my pocket and my hair down.

My mother was already at the kitchen table rolling pierogi dough.

She looked at my hair and then at the window and said nothing about either.

Her pill bottle sat by the sugar bowl with its orange cap.

I had decided on the stairs that I would not do this on a day when she was tired.

Then I saw that she was never anything else.

"Mama, I have to tell you what's in those," I said.

I told her plainly, one fact to a sentence.

I told her about the gland under a fold's jaw, the pearl, the extract and the pharmacy shelves.

I told her that the folds were people, and that I had held a school bus driver's last hour.

She put the rolling pin down, and her swollen knuckles lay open on the flour.

"The woman in the paper said you were not well," she said finally. "I said to myself, no, she has always been this way."

"Mama."

"Give me the bottle."

I gave it to her, and she shook one pill into her palm and looked at it for a long time.

"Two years I have taken these," she said. "Before them, the doctor said my hands would curl like roots by Christmas."

"I know."

"Your father made me promise to use my hands as long as they worked, Halinka."

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