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“Oh, what’s even the point?” Said Barbara. She looked up at the twinkling stars and the cold crescent moon. She reached for the sky in futility.

“After all I did for you, after all I pushed,” she said.

Margaret, Barbara’s companion in the darkness, spoke.

“Was it really for me?” Margaret said. But there was something off about Margaret. Her face was clear and bright, but everything else under the moon was bathed in shadows.

Barbara raised her eyebrow. “You dare talk back to me, your mother? Without me breaking my damn back everyday, you’d have never got to University, you’d have never become a doctor, and now, now when everything is right with you, you’re leaving me here, to whither and die?”

But something was off about Barbara. She spoke with force and clarity, but she couldn’t feel her legs, her arms, her mouth, her face.

Margaret raised her arm to a sapphire sky. Somehow it was both a silhouette and photoreal. Barbara could see the bruises, she could see the blood.

“Was it really for me?” Margaret said.

Notes

This was written in 15 minutes during a Joy of Writing meetup.