What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey

shattered her prized candy dish she’d been about to wash.
    “Nobody walks that quietly, Sylvie, without they’re trying to,” she cried, looking piteously at the glass scattered around her feet.
    “Gawd, you always says that.”
    “Then why you doing it—always trying to frighten me?”
    “I don’t. I’m not—lord, everybody else always hears me.”
    “Everybody else—you only does it around me, whatever kind of game you’re playing.”
    “Well, you knows I’m in the house,” I kept going as Mother fell to her knees, picking up bits of glass, “what’s so strange about me walking down the hall—you rather I stayed in my room all day?” Getting nothing more than a painful yelp from Mother as she pricked a finger with a sliver of glass, I gave a righteous huff and went outside, muttering loudly about the unfairness of her accusations when I was simply walking down the hallway, was all, simply minding my own business like the day in the graveyard, like the abandoned house thing—just minding my own business when suddenly, poof—there’s Mother, all in a jitters and frightening her own self with her own jittery nerves.
    “Jumpin’s, why’s everybody so rabbity,” I complained a few days after the broken dish, when I appeared out of the hallway, startling Gran this time.
    “You’ll give us all heart attacks,” warned Gran as I glided to the sofa, picking up the catalogue I’d been flipping through earlier. I sat with my back to them both, hearing Gran tsk. A sideways glance at Mother showed her pursed mouth as she kept silent, stirring the meat and onions she was frying up on the stove. Gran, letting out a small groan over the ache in her legs from the foggy, drizzly day outside, shuffled to where I was sitting and poked at my back with a gnarled finger.
    “I tell you, you’re making your mother sick,” she said irritably.
    “Jumpin’s, I didn’t do nothing.”
    “You’re making your mother sick, I tell you.”
    “How’s I making her sick—I don’t do nothing to make her sick.”
    “You just frightened Gran,” said Mother firmly. “So I’m not imagining things when you frightened Gran as well. It’s how you’ve always been, sneaking about.”
    I jumped to my feet, swinging around to face her. “I don’t! I don’t sneak about, you always says that, and I don’t. Well, I don’t,” I yelled as Mother went, tight-lipped, back to her stirring.
    I threw the catalogue on the sofa. “You always believes her,” I charged Gran. “Ever since we moved in here you always believes her.”
    Gran tsked again, sitting back down in her rocker.
    “Well, it’s true!” I yelled. Hurt by Gran’s not listening, and with a surge of brazenness, I looked to Mother, saying in a loud, prim voice, “Not my fault you’re always thinking I’m a ghost. Well, that’s what you thinks, isn’t it, that I’m a ghost? You always looks afraid of me, like I was walking around dead or something. I believe you wishes I was dead, anyway.”
    I fell silent for a moment, Mother’s face going all white again. “And perhaps I wishes I was dead,” I yelled, my voice turning into a whine. “I wouldn’t have to live here then, she only likes Chris anyway,” and felt the cut of my words in Mother’s flinch. “Leaving here anyway,” I shouted, half bawling now, and fled down the hall, “soon’s I finishes school, I’m leaving, I won’t be living around here.”
    I slammed the door of my room and fell across the bed, heart pounding, ears ringing, no different from that moment when I’d sat hidden in the closet of the boarded-up house. Only this time I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d just blown it out like a tempest, releasing a tension in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there till now, with the sudden release of its being gone.
    But, like any rutted container in a storm, it remained empty only for as long as it takes the elements to fill it again, and instantly my chest tightened with another