Page 19 of Monsters of Mayhem

We had sat at the doctor‘s, my mom her usual strong, determined self. She had only come along with me because I’d insisted she needed pain meds. She had been more than willing to live with the pain. I remembered her hair was dyed bright purple. The crazy thing was she carried it off, an old lady with purple hair and paint splattered on her shirt. She loved to draw and paint particularly flowers. It was her passion. She had received quite the settlement from my father when he died and she’d decided she would spend the rest of her life doing exactly what she loved, which was painting flowers.

The doctor returned to us and said we could go to hospice and they could give her some stronger medication than he could prescribe.

I had been completely floored. I’d sat there, my world dropping out from under my feet. I’d looked at my mother and she had taken a deep breath and exhaled, as if it was a relief.

Her only reaction had been that she really didn’t want to go into a home.

“Stop, wait,” I’d said, holding my head up to the Doctor who was still explaining all the benefits of hospice.

I looked at my mother.

“Wait,” I said, still trying to understand exactly what was happening as my world was falling apart. “You don’t have to go to hospice, mother,” I had told her very clearly, despite the inconvenience it would cause. “You will come home with me and stay in my house.” At the time I owned a small house I had bought using my share of my father‘s inheritance.

I’d turned back to the doctor. “What are you saying? Put it into plain English. Because I don’t understand how we went from her needing Vicodin to ease the pain to her needing a hospice.”

The doctor had folded his arms across his chest and looked down at me sadly yet professionally. I still didn’t know how doctors put on a strong face when they’re telling you the darkest news of your life. “Your mother has blood cancer,” he said. “It’s pretty advanced and we don’t think she’ll hold up to chemo or surgery.”

“She’s only 75,” I said as my life crashed around my ears. I had expected to have my mom around for another 10-20 years.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” the doctor had said.

I’d looked at my mom and she’d shrugged with a slight smile on her face. “I’ve had a good life,” she said.

“You can’t… you can’t die,” I’d said as my eyes filled with tears and I stared at her.

“It’s okay, Jelly,” she’d said, reverting to my childhood nickname. “I’ve had a good run.”

I’d held my tongue because this wasn’t about me. This was about my mother. Tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t say a word as the doctor had continued to drone on about how hospice care worked and how they would come and check on my mother if she was staying at our house. They would have nurses and provide help as much as she needed it and morphine for when the pain got too bad.

I‘d gotten her home, but she’d only lasted ten days. Ten days where I’d watched her deteriorate. Not so much in weight, even though she didn’t eat much, but the cancer was in her blood flowing through her system. She’d taken the morphine, which had caused all sorts of other internal problems, and she had gone from being able to get up and walk to just being able to stand up to having to lie down the entire time. I had brushed her teeth, combed her hair, helped her go to the toilet in a bucket by the bed and wiped her bottom. I had done everything I needed to do to help my mother with her last days until she had died.

I had laid down with her body and held her until the people from the mortuary had shown up to take her away. When it was my mother lying there dead, all I wanted to do was cuddle her one last time.

I had gone the next day and changed my major to research and determined I was going to be the one to find a cure for cancer.

Now, twenty years later, nothing like that had even come close to happening. I just sat in the lab safely doing my little tests and pretending I was doing something good for the world, when in fact I was just hiding from it.

I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. I had escaped the sad tears in order to fight back to my life and instead, I had ended up a wooden doll on a shelf in a witch’s shop in Alameda.

I needed to talk to Laney. She knew me best. She’d been with me through graduate school, through my mother’s death, through all the decisions I’d made in my life. Hell, she’d been the maid of honor at my wedding. Something she always said was one of the best days of her life. I may not know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I needed to find Laney.

So, when Eunice came in the morning, that was the first thing I knew I had to do.

She lifted me off the shelf and put me on the floor, then waved her arms over me.

I grew and the wood disappeared. As I stepped forward, I asked her very quickly, “I need to borrow your phone to call my friend.”

Chapter 13

The winds were so strong going up the mountain I couldn’t use my wings to fly. I had to hunker down and stay low to the ground and claw my way to the top. Ratchet wasn’t much better off. He was using his heat just enough to melt a foothold in the mountain, but his powers were still weak from his brush with death. Each finger holding to the side of the mountain was like sticking my fingers in a bucket of ice water. Extraordinarily cold ice water. Before long, my fingers were numb and it took all my power to keep going.

“How long did she say we had to go before we got to the valley?” I asked.

Ratchet grimaced all the way to the top. I took another look at him, watching his muscles shake as he pulled himself along. The mountain was steep with rocky outcroppings and snow blew in our faces. A blast of wind took the dust off the top of the ice and sprayed it like hail against us. It wasn’t soft, comfortable snow; this was bitter hard and cold pellets of snow that left us no doubt we were in frost giant land.

“Aren’t you related to these people anyhow?” Ratchet asked, his voice weak. “It seemed like you would know them a little better.”

“I certainly don’t know them as well as you do,” I commented. “What’s with you and Hurgud?”

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