Koren Zailckas - Mother, Mother - Psychological suspense for fans of ROOM

For the first time, Violet wondered if she really was crazy, not just deliriously hungry and high. Maybe morning glory seeds had brought out some kind of latent schizophrenia. Where acid was concerned, some people—maybe Violet included—left reality and never quite made it back. Was that why she had no recollection of what she’d done to Will? She sometimes had difficulty remembering all the insightful parts of an acid trip, but she’d never had an entire memory slip through her fingers. LSD didn’t make people black out. Maybe schizophrenia or some other mental disorder did.

Violet knew, of course, that there was a chance she’d hallucinated Rose. Her sister could have been a trick of the light, a trick of Violet’s drugged or possibly diseased mind. Even before morning glory seeds, Violet had been ill-fed and ill-rested. The thinner she got, the more sitting or lying down hurt, so she’d been spending most nights doing walking meditations, pacing around and around her room, trying to drum up some forgiveness for Rose. Sleep-deprived, Violet had been having basic distortions. Colors seemed brighter. She’d been feeling like she had less control over her angry thoughts, which just kept returning to the Hurst who got away.

In the final months before Rose fled the scene, Violet had watched her sister closely. She’d seen Rose say no to drugs, no to dating, no to saying no, and she’d thought, What if I pick the opposite for myself? Because what’s the point of being good when Rose ended up miserable all the same? Although the Hurst daughters had never been close, their mother had made life equally difficult for them. Violet believed that her sister left because it was the only solution to a long-standing problem. The problem was this: Josephine had made it very clear that no man, woman, or child should be more important to Rose than her family. That was why Rose rarely dated. That was why she was withdrawn. That was why Rose ran off with a mysterious stranger named Damien. Damien , like an Omen joke. Like the devil’s son.

But no one was going to swoop in and help Violet start her independent life. Every day, she had to plow through her controlling household like someone machete-whacking her way through a jungle that grew right back thicker and thornier every night. That was what she’d been thinking in the kitchen as she gesticulated with her mother’s chef’s knife.

The knife. Violet could remember lots about the knife. She could recall how brilliant the blade looked in her hallucinated gaze. She could remember the feel of it rocking back and forth against the cutting board. She even remembered how empowered she felt, aiming the tapered tip at Josephine. But she could not remember practicing her knife skills on Will. What in the hell had she done? Butterflied his palm like a chicken breast? Grabbed and pared his thumb? Why?

Violet laid still and searched her mind for any reason she might have hurt her brother. Had he tried to intervene on their mother’s behalf? Had he said something in defense of Josephine that had pissed Violet off? She couldn’t ignore the possibility that she’d hurt Will—odd little yes-man that he was—because she envied the way their mom’s love came easily to him.

The longer Violet brainstormed on the subject, the woozier she felt.

Her most lucid memory so far was a premonition—the moment she realized just how bad her trip was going to be:

They’d been sitting, sipping their algae-green cocktails in the casbah comfort of the Fields’ vaulted living room. The Fields’ house always made Violet feel pleasantly stoned from the moment she walked in the door. Stained-glass lanterns cast fractured rainbows over the leather pouf ottomans. Ceilings were painted lagoon blue or blazing saffron. The air smelled like cedar. Josephine called the Fields “platinum card hippies.” Beryl and Rolf had met when they were both enrolled at Bard College, but when they found out they were pregnant with twins, Rolf had shaved his Fu Manchu and swapped his burgeoning art career for one in finance.

Violet was still occasionally starstruck in the presence of her exotic and blasé friends. Imogene’s rainbow-dyed hair resembled a Neapolitan cookie. Finch had heavy blond bangs hanging over his horn-rimmed glasses. Jasper was wearing a coonskin cap and a T-shirt that bore a quote by the street artist Banksy: A lot of parents will do anything for their kids except let them be themselves. How they hadn’t realized they were too cool for Violet was beyond her.

A full hour had gone by with no effect. Finch sat in front of his MacBook, watching a bunch of short, surrealist films by the Czech artist Jan Švankmajer.

“Fuck botany,” Jasper said. “Those seeds are worthless.”

“Maybe we should have fasted before we ate them,” Finch said, and Violet had felt a little trill of excitement. She had been fasting, in secret, for reasons she hadn’t shared with her friends.

Something happened while Violet was racking her brain for the answer to 40-across (“motherless calf”), and the boys giggled over Švankmajer’s Meat Love . On-screen, two slabs of beef grunted and thrust against each other on a floured cutting board.

“Ha!” Finch cried. “He de-floured her!”

Jasper laughed. “Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase slapping your meat .”

The sight of all that rare, glistening steak sent a prickling sensation spreading up Violet’s legs. Her empty stomach spasmed. She stood up to go to the bathroom and felt the room jump very close to her, almost as though she had taken five steps forward instead of just one. When she stepped backward, the same effect happened in reverse.

“Are you okay?” Finch asked.

“Hurst looks like she just hit a wall of fucked-up-ness,” Jasper said.

“I’ll go with you,” Imogene told her. “I’m not feeling pitch-perfect either.”

Violet felt like she was spinning along a slanted axis. In the bathroom, she lifted the toilet lid to puke and saw a steak, blue-rare and bloody, in the bowl. Hot on the heels of that hallucination came an auditory one. She heard shrieking laughter. Then, her mother’s voice whisper-hot in her ear: It’s the food chain, Viola. Shut up and eat it.

Now she crept across the hospital linoleum (frigid) to the bathroom (unlockable). Inside, she was greeted by a twelve-inch shatterproof mirror. The image reflected back at her was far more Martian than girl. Voluntary starvation had yellowed her skin. Her pupils—although not the full lunar eclipses that they’d been earlier at Imogene’s house—hadn’t shrunk back down to normal, nonwasted size. She ran her palm, neck to widow’s peak, over the hedgehog bristle of her scruffy head. Even in her tolerant locale—the Hursts lived only seventeen miles from Woodstock—Violet’s peers regarded her hair and diet as a little extreme.

There had been a couple of love interests back in freshman year, when Violet had sported a loose ponytail (not just stubble). Troy Barnes had given her a Vicks VapoRub massage the first time she took Ecstasy. Finch had kissed her in the Rosendale caves and sent her hilarious text messages for weeks after, things like, You have soiled my soul. I feel swollen and ashamed . But after Violet shaved her head, lesbian rumors swirled and those two backed off, along with the rest of the male species. Finch just wanted to be friends. Troy called her cue ball , when he called her at all. For all the social troubles that zealotry had caused Violet, she couldn’t seem to give up fasting, meditating, or reading books with lotus blossoms or cumulus clouds on the covers. After Rose ran away, Violet had needed something to disappear into too. Religion seemed as good an escape route as any, plus it was conveniently compatible with psychedelics.