Sam #2
Her mother turns the laptop’s screen around, and in a flash, Sam realizes her mistake—she’d forgotten that her school sent out progress reports today. And even though she’s too far away to read everything on the screen, she can plainly make out her grades. C-. B-. D+. D.
She winces. They are lower than she thought.
When she remains silent, too afraid to speak, her mother brings up a long scroll of the laptop’s search history. Diamond Taylor. Will Taylor. Alchemy. Alchemy. Alchemy.
“How long have you been looking all this up?” her mother asks quietly.
“Not long, Mama.”
“Why?”
“I was just curious.”
“What’s going on with your grades?”
“I promise I’ll do better next month.”
“You spend all your time reading garbage online instead of studying?”
Sam swallows hard. “It’s just midsemester,” she murmurs. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s not a big deal.” Her mother considers her in silence, lips pursed, and Sam realizes with dread that she has said exactly the wrong thing.
Her mother gets up from the couch without a word and walks into their bedroom. When she comes back out, she has Rabbit clutched in her hand.
The hairs rise on the back of Sam’s neck. She has never seen her mother this angry before.
“Does nothing I say matter to you?” her mother asks in a low voice.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” Sam whispers, her eyes flickering to Rabbit.
Her mother heads into the kitchen and grabs a long knife. With a blank face, her mother puts Rabbit on the counter and saws off one of its ears.
Sam gasps as if she feels the pain. “Mama, don’t,” she says, stepping closer.
Her mother doesn’t look at her, doesn’t say anything as she cuts off the other ear.
“Mama, stop!”
Her mother stabs the knife deep into the toy’s soft side. Stitches rip as she cuts open its belly.
“Stop! Stop!” Sam tries reaching for Rabbit, but her mother shoves her roughly away.
“You’re too old for these toys,” her mother says through gritted teeth. “Old enough to waste your time. Old enough to break your promises.”
Balls of cotton fall from the counter onto the floor.
Sam feels like the world is tilting around her.
She can hear herself sobbing as she watches her friend hacked into pieces.
When she tries to grab the knife from her mother’s hand, her mother scowls at her and pushes her away hard enough to send her tumbling backward.
There, Sam kneels and cries so hard that snot streams from her nose.
Her mother rips open Rabbit’s body and throws the stuffed carcass at her daughter. Sam flinches as the remains hit her in the face.
“Why do you think I work all day?” her mother asks. “For fun?”
Sam’s voice trembles. “No, Mama.”
“Your head is always in the clouds. You have no fear at all. You’re so stupid.”
Sam is too scared to lift her eyes, so instead she stares down through the blur of her tears at Rabbit’s remains.
She thinks about all the times she’d told it stories, how carefully it always listened to her, how it’d comforted her for so many years.
Then she thinks about the idiocy of her grief.
Rabbit isn’t alive. It is a toy mass-manufactured in a factory somewhere by machine hands, pumped out of a steel chute and wrapped in plastic and shipped to a store.
It has no real ears to listen to her. It has no real eyes to see her.
It is an object composed of other objects and it doesn’t give a shit how Sam feels.
The crack on the ceiling is just a crack on the ceiling, and the snail’s shell is just a snail’s shell, and the dandelions growing in the pavement are just a bunch of weeds.
Rabbit is nothing but a stuffed animal, its innards spilling across her lap in a cloud of cotton.
The sudden silence seems to deflate her mother. She places the knife down on the counter, her shoulders sagging, and stares at the trembling figure of her little girl. But she doesn’t apologize.
“I’m only going to tell you this one time.” She leans down to give Sam a hard stare. “I don’t ever want to see you looking up alchemy again.”
Sam is shaking too hard to speak, so she just nods. She can’t tell if her progress report or her searches have upset her mother more. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? She understands the anger over her grades. But why at alchemy?
Her mother turns her back and goes to the kitchen sink, where she starts washing the dishes. The shame in Sam’s chest feels like a crater, gaping and bloody. All she wants right now is for her mother not to be angry with her, so she makes herself a silent promise to never look up alchemy again.
But that does not stop the questions from burrowing themselves deeper into her mind.
Even now, she feels an overwhelming sense that there is an entire world out there with its walls up, the knowledge beyond her reach.
And if she had been just curious before, her mother’s reaction is the wind that ignites the spark, the not-knowing festering in her with the hunger of a fire.
What is everyone so afraid of? What is beyond her? Why can’t she know?