Forgive me Mother.

This is anonymous right?  I suppose I’m only posting here because I want validation, I want someone else to agree that I did the right thing.   

Mother raised the four of us in a small cabin in the woods.  It’d only take look at her to tell that she wasn’t our real mother.  With her gaunt, angular face, sallow, moist skin, unusually long limbs, and silent gapping mouth.  Her jaw always hung uselessly open, and so she always either ties her jaw shut or covers her face.  You’d think that even as children we’d see her as the monster she is, but in my earliest memories I loved her.  Like any foolish child would. 

I’ve never learned how she found us in the first place, and I never thought to ask before.  I wouldn’t be surprised to discover she kidnapped us.  Maybe she found a lost couple in the woods and decided to squirrel away their children to fatten up for later.  I don’t even want to know anymore; I want to put any thought of her behind me.  

Mother bided her time for years.  Feeding us, caring for us, spending each night sewing our clothes or carving us toys, taking us to therapy lessons when we ended up as silent as her, and forcing us to attend school.  She gave us everything, but we must’ve been mere livestock that she was slowly cultivating. 

The one useful thing Mother taught us was how to hunt.  Mother was always silent, but she could teach in her own way.  How to stalk, how to track, how to spot the sick and weak animals, and how to clean what you’ve killed.  That was the part I hated most; flaying, eviscerating, gutting, dressing the poor animal.  And every time Mother used the same hideous knife, a simple thing of bone and steel.  Even now, every time I see it, I can only picture the poor animals Mother mutilated with it.  After I threw up all over a kill while Mother was trying to teach me the proper way to dress it, she stopped taking me hunting.  But she still made me eat meat.  Only after I moved out years later was I able to become a vegetarian.  Cleaning and sharpening that disgusting blade seemed to be her only hobby outside of raising us. 

Timothy was the first of us to go.  Mother began teaching him once I refused to go hunting.  She forced him outside the cabin early every morning for weeks.  Even in the cold winter.  He developed a terrible hacking cough.  But he still went into those harsh woods with Mother, day after day.  One morning he could barely get out bed; all he could do was cough endlessly.  Mother simply picked him up and carried him out.  We watched her trudge through the snow with him strung over her back until they disappeared amongst the trees.  Mother didn’t come home that night, but I swear we could hear screaming far off in the distance.  It was a couple more days after that until Mother finally came home, along with Timothy.  He was changed.  Frightened.  Red-rimmed eyes and a dirty snot-coated face.  We asked Mother what happened and she scrawled a single word on the kitchen chalkboard, “Sick.”  But when we were in our room away from Mother, he showed us what she did.  His chest was littered with precise cuts, brutally stitched together with black thread.  The skin was still red and raw.  Timothy insisted Mother did it to him, and at the time we wouldn’t believe him.  I do now.  

Timothy ran away after that, saying he would write to us when he was safe.  I never received the letter he promised.  Back then I assumed he got lost in the woods, or was still too scared of Mother to write.  But now I know Mother must have found him and finished her work.  

Brad was next.  Mother controlled every part of our lives, and it must’ve slowly worn on him.  She decided what children we’d play with, what classes we took, and it continued as we grew older.  When Brad wanted to join the military to escape her control, and she forbade him.  They had a terrible fight.  Brad yelling while Mother wordlessly shook her head.  Mother ended up grabbing one of our old notebooks and scratching out in her nearly illegible handwriting, “You’ll die.”  Brad scoffed and tried to brush past her, and she shoved the notebook in his face, again, and again.  He just grabbed it and tossed it aside.  One month after he was deployed, we received a letter stating that Brad had fallen in the line of duty, but after what I’ve seen, I’m certain Mother must’ve caused it.  After that, when she demanded that Claire attend a specific college, she didn’t disagree with Mother, nor did I as Mother went on to specify the jobs I applied to, and even the woman I’d date.  She was the one that pushed me towards proposing to Margret.  

When I got older, Mother found a house for Margret and I near her forest.  We already had an apartment in the city where I worked, and a move would require me to find a new job to work remotely.  Nevertheless, as I did with almost all her demands, I complied with little hesitation, despite the discomfort I felt from being close to her again.  After we had our first child, Adam, she began visiting us more frequently.  Often, she’d just stand there watching the baby with a bandana wrapped under her jaw and over her head to keep her mouth closed.  Sometimes I’d even spot her standing at the edge of the forest staring at the window of my son’s bedroom.  I’d allow her to hold him sometimes, but it always felt unsettling.  I never left her alone with him.  

Last week I heard a creak from my son’s bedroom and when I went to check on him, Mother was there.  Towering over his tiny toddler bed, eyes glued to him, even in the darkness.  “Mother, what’s going on?” I asked her.  She was silent as ever, merely pointing one gnarled finger at him.  She wouldn’t leave, so I ended up taking Adam out to sleep in our room for the night.  That morning, he had a terrible cough.  No doubt caused by Mother.   

It was the same every night.  No matter what I did, locking the windows, having Adam sleep in a different room, begging Mother to leave us alone.  I always found her standing over him. Each night it seemed as if she got closer to Adam, and each morning Adam’s cough got worse.  The over-the-counter medicine I gave him was barely enough to allow him get to sleep each night.   

A few hours ago, I discovered the truth.  I found her crouched over his bed on all fours, with her mouth gaping open.  A guttural rattle began emerging from her throat, forming a wordless lullaby.  It sounded familiar, and I started to feel sleepy.  As I watched, groggy and paralyzed with terror, her fingers began poking and prodding my son’s body before stopping over his chest, all while Adam gently snored in a deep sleep.  She drew back slightly, and Mother’s right arm reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a knife.  I recognized it as the knife she used to gut and clean what she hunted.  Then somehow her jaw opened even wider and she slid her left arm deep inside her own throat and pulled out a fist full of a slime that stank of ammonia.  I had to cover my mouth and pinch my nose to fend off the noxious stench. Then she lifted up his shirt and began slathering his chest with that slime.  When she started to slide the blade along his skin, I snapped out of my debilitation and lunged at her.  

Even as an old woman, Mother easily held me at bay.   Then that sickening face turned towards me, and from the depths of that blackened mouth of razor-sharp teeth, I heard Mother’s voice for the first time.  

“Sssiiick,” she croaked out in a throaty rasp that sounded like it was coming from the depths of a tunnel, “ccclleeeann,” she held up her knife.  I knew the only kind of cleaning that knife ever did.  At that moment what really happened to Timothy clicked in my mind and I started to sob.  I threw myself between Adam and Mother, but she simply grabbed my shoulder and stopped me in my tracks.  As she squeezed mt shoulder, I couldn’t help but let out an involuntary gasp at the strength of her grip.  Then, she shoved me back and my impact with the door knocked the wind out of me.  Her wretched voice came forth again, “ssstay.”

I knew I’d need something stronger to deal with Mother and dashed out the room.  When I came back a moment later, Mother had already made her first incision into Adam, and that helped to steel my resolve as I leveled my shotgun.  With tears streaming down my face, I could barely aim the gun, but at this range I couldn’t miss.  The last thing I said to her before I pulled the trigger was, “I’m sorry.”  Then I left her body to rot while I raced Adam to the hospital.  Mother must have been doing something to him.  Slowly poisoning him every night.  As a seasoning, or just for her own sick pleasure, I’ll never know. 

Now, I’m sitting in the waiting room writing this all out while they examine and operate on Adam.  I feel guilty, not just for lying to the hospital staff about what happened, but also for what I had to do to Mother.  I know I shouldn’t feel that way.  Mother should be the one forgiving me.  I was just protecting my son.  I did the right thing, didn’t I?  It can’t even be murder, can it?  Killing an inhuman monster like that is merely hunting.  

My wife called right when I was about to post this.  She had gotten home from work and we were missing, all of us.  While there’s still blood all over the floor and signs of a struggle, there’s no trace of Mother’s body in Adam’s room.  

Ever since that call, fear has been building inside me again.  I have to keep a strong face for Adam, but I don’t know what to do next.  When she’s done licking her wounds who will she hunt next, me or Adam?  And what can I possibly do to stop her?