Snippet #2381011

"I'm back, mom! I brought you a mocha if you want it, decaf, non-fat, no whip!" Erin closed the front door by nudging it with her foot. Had her mom even gotten out of her room today? Lately it seemed as though her mother were mourning or something, but that obviously wasn't the case. She didn't even have any friends to be sad for if they did die.

"Mama, come on out," Erin had crossed the small kitchen that was connected to the small living room and stopped in front of her mother's bedroom door. Inside, she could hear muttering. The nearly-eighteen year old hesitated, her hand lingering just above the doorknob before gripping it. A charm on the doorknob jingled softly as Erin turned the knob slowly. She didn't want to admit to herself that she was scared by her mother's behavior. Last week, she'd been telling stories of monsters that the form of an angel and could not be killed by plagues. It seemed as though she were slowly going insane, her mother was, and for whatever reason Erin's birthday seemed to be a taboo topic.

"Mom this is a mess!" Erin said upon entering her mother's room, which really ought to be called a lair due to its uncleanliness. And there was her mother, with her hands in her hair sitting in a fetal position on her bed. She'd drawn runes, banishing circles, protecting circles, all over her room, and even on the ceiling. Was that... crying, that she heard?

"M...mother..." What was there to say? The woman on the bed before Erin was hardly a mother, and seemed more to be a broken woman pleading to go to an asylum.

"...Come here, Tib," the daughter diverted her attention to a crow that had taken to pecking at a picture whose frame was cracked. It looked as though it must have been thrown against something, and with curiosity Erin gingerly picked up the photograph, frame and all, minding the shards that fell off and landed on the desk with the sound of bells. "Is this dad, Tib?" Erin asked the bird, knowing that her mother wasn't usually coherent in this state. The bird bobbed up and down, almost like a nod.

"TIB!" the panicking woman leaped up from her bed and ripped the framed picture from Erin's hands, screaming at the bird in a shrill voice that almost sounded like Tib's own caws. "SHE CAN'T KNOW!" she shrieked. Had her hair always been so dark brown? It had never seemed so close to black. And her fingers, the way they grasped at the object in her hands, it made her fingertips almost seem like talons. Erin's mind seemed to be playing tricks on her.

"Mom, stop! Stop! You're scaring me, stop!!" The daughter backed out of the disastrously shambled room, holding her ears to drown out the sound of the crow and her mother, whose cries could almost be described exactly as caws now.

Erin let the door slam behind her, and she stumbled onto the floor, hands still over her ears and some tears beginning to form in her eyes. Something was wrong, something was definitely wrong. With a shaky finger, Erin slowly drew a summoning circle in the carpet. "Please let her be better...Please give her peace...give her peace."

The day after tomorrow, Erin would be considered a legal adult. She doubted that she could leave her mother.