A Short Piece

Dedicated to my mother, whom I have lived in constant terror of all my life.

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Helena looked at Alicia’s expression and, instantly, she realized something was woefully amiss.

There was a smile on her face. A genuine, bright smile.

The instant that the image had been processed and the realization took hold, she decided to figure out just what caused such a thing to occur. She looked around the surrounding area first, almost too eager to see if anything was…out of the ordinary. Nothing looked to be different or altered among the more visible fixtures of the room.

The small TV was where it was usually perched, across the room and largely untouched. Helena had only seen it in use a few times since Alicia moved into the condo unit they shared. It was largely left to occupy space or gather dust rather than be put to use.

The bed was a mess, with the sheets just barely being on it and the pillows in disarray. There were bits of brown smattered across the summer colors of the sheets, little chips of paint feeling from the floor and sticking to Alicia’s bare feet. The unused TV’s remote was there too, lying on the bed. In other words, nothing changed there either.

The laptop, which Alicia had named ‘Kaguya’ as soon as it was taken home, sat flat on the desk it usually occupied. It wasn’t on with a few programs running, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary or strange. Helena learned long ago that Alicia had a tendency to leave ‘Kaguya’ on if she had something to do that interrupted whatever it was she was up to on the laptop. Either that or she was downloading something. The fact that it was on despite not being used, therefore, was not at all strange.

It was then that she saw a strange new addition to the darkened room’s usual empty dreariness: another human being.

“Well, I’ll be going now,” the new person said as he turned for the door, towards Helena.

“Yeah,” Alicia said. The smile, Helena noted, had not faded. “Thanks for the good news.”

Once the door was closed, Helena let her curiosity get the better of her. “Excuse me,” she began, “who are you?”

He gave her a mildly annoyed look, and then sighed. “I’m her brother.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

Again, he shot the annoyed look, but again he seemed to just accept her inquiry as inevitability. “Fine, go ahead.”

“Well, I’ve been living with her for about two years now, and I’ve never seen her so happy,” she said. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her happy.”

He paused for a moment, as if letting the answer roll around in his head. Then, with a look of what Helena believed was both apathy and resignation in his eyes, he spoke. “You know what life is like when, from a very young age, you learn that you’re terrified, absolutely mortified by the mere presence of someone that’s supposed to make you feel safe?”

Helena blinked, but didn’t respond.

“Alicia and I learned to put on masks, to pretend not to care, to just let things slide off our shoulders like dust. It wasn’t something we wanted to learn, but it sort of became a required skill for survival.”

He paused, as if what he said had stirred up something inside him.

“We couldn’t let our real personalities show, and I think, for her, the mask killed who she really was, could be,” he said as he looked at the closed door. “Her emotions came along for the ride. She learned to kill the real ones and cultivate the false ones, pruning and trimming, grooming them like a bonsai tree.”

Helena kept silent, still uncertain what to say.

“We learned to fake sincerity and became inordinately proficient at it, too. We’d display the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times, and we’d be absolutely convincing while doing it. All the while, we kept the only real emotion we felt hidden from everyone but us. Let it take root, you could say.”

“What…was it?”

“Terror.”

“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with my question?”

“What I told her was good news, and that made her smile. That’s the short answer of it.”

“What was the news, then?”

“Our mother is dead,” he said with a sincere smile. “Which means she can let herself feel emotions again.”

He turned and walked to the door again, but paused briefly before he left.

“She’s free at last.”

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