Mom was waiting outside the john when the door opened---practically laying in wait. She wore a bleak, but hungry expression. A vulture's leer. "Did you just pass a stone, Son?"
"Uh, yeah."
Her eyes brightened, but not all the way. The running toilet sound was still going on. My invisible "friend" was keeping my latest excretion hidden from sight.
"Did you...keep it?" Mom asked.
I looked around. The man in black she had been talking to was nowhere to be seen.
"No," I said, "It got...flushed."
Her expression turned dark. Betrayed. She was now my enemy.
But maybe I had a friend. Behind me, I felt the air swish as the invisible informant breezed past me and on her way.
Payback, she had said. Some evil corporation was using people for experiments. And now Mom and I were part of that experiment.
The game was on.
A maze of one way streets stood between home and laundry.
She had the car keys. And loads of laundry in the machines. A dilemma. But she had no reason to think I knew anything.
She was trying to hide her plan, but her face showed what I feared. I stepped out of the john, adjusting my pants.
Could I get home before she could? Get home and find the containers? I gave it a shot.
And before you ask, I didn't.
Cramped muscles, sore bones, strained tendons and a general malaise that came from months of ill-health saw to that.
Mom hadn't serviced the car in about the same amount of time. The brakes screeched, the radiator billowed, cylinders misfired---but she got home before I did by a narrow margin. It was enough.
We saw each other struggling to get home. She drove the wrong way down three streets to get home, dodging and honking. I took all the shortcuts I knew, going through neighbor's yards and over fences, draining what energy I had for the chance of getting one of two of those stones. I also had to keep mine out of her clutches while I was at it.
Trouble was, Mom had the presence of mind to carry some of the stones around in her purse. Whether she ate some of hers along with mine didn't matter much.
In minutes, she wrestled me to the floor and beat on me, belying her haggard appearance. The clothes at the laundry blocks away would stay there; they meant nothing now. Her job, my school---they were all irrelevant.
"NUTRA-BOOM" took a long time to pay off and brought us both close to death, but it finally paid off. Mom had just gotten the payoff first.
I regained consciousness in bed, naked, tied down. And for the next week, I passed those weird stones that months and months of taking "NUTRA-BOOM" had triggered.
Using a pill-cutter, Mom gave me slivers of hers, just to keep me strong enough to keep "laying" like the storied Golden Goose. She wasn't going to kill me so long as I could keep coming up with energy pills.
The bitch.
Mom was power-mad, and I shouldn't have been too surprised.
For the first day, she was disorganized. The sudden boost of energy had been like a powerful drug---a real shock to her system. She was going ten directions at once, talking to herself, sitting down only to stand up in another moment and begin pacing. Objects in the house felt her abuse. She kicked chairs and punched things and knocked her head against the walls with the thoughtless rage of a drugged-up weirdo in the streets.
She bit her nails till they bled, pulled out clumps of her own hair, pounded her fists on everything---trying to clear her head. Only in those erratic moments there were signs of hope. She was so erratic, she was bound to make a mistake sooner or later.
It was later. It was definitely later.