Visit from Mom
By: René Junge
Tags: Psychopath, Fiction, Short Fiction, Flash Fiction, Serial Killers

Visit from Mom

Every killer has a story

Photo by Nick Grappone on Unsplash

It was that time again: This time Frank had met her in the supermarket, in the vegetable section, where it smelled most strongly of chanterelles.

Now she was standing under his shower.

She had smelled like chanterelles before, too. When she was hiding in the closet when Dad wasn’t home, and they had played “Make a little peep.”

Frank had always known that Mom would be hiding in the closet at some point, but he never knew exactly how many rounds they had to play before that happened.

Most of the time, he found her quite quickly, but when the shrill “ beep “ came out of the closet, he had always tried to turn a deaf ear, shouting that he couldn’t find her because Frank didn’t dare say that he didn’t want to find her at all — not there.

Soon, however, she had always called out in a squeaky voice, “look for the little mouse in the closet, my darling, look for it quickly in the closet!”. It’s so afraid, all by itself.”

Then, of course, he had no choice but to go into the bedroom and look in the closet.

Mom was then sitting in there, wearing nothing and pointing at the fur stuff between her spread legs. There was a sour smell in the closet, like a musty forest floor. Later he had read in a book that women down there sometimes smelled like chanterelles. In his memory, that was exactly the smell that had emanated from the closet mixed with that of cheap cognac whenever he had found Mama in there.

“Look, there’s the little mouse,” Mama had always said then, pointing to the spot. “Look, it’ s already sweating from fear, and it’s hot all over. You have to pet it to calm it down, my darling.”

Frank had never seen a little mouse there. He knew what mice looked like in real life because the teacher had once brought one in a glass box at school.

Frank had then sneaked back to class after that lesson at the big break, taken the mouse out of the jar by the tail with pointed fingers, and then flushed it down the school toilet. He hated ALL mice.

The real ones he hated and the fake ones he even feared. The real ones smelled bad too, but not THAT bad. They didn’t feel as slippery as Mom’s, but he hated them because they reminded him of his fear and the closet.

Mom had been dead for five years now. But sometimes she came back. Occasionally she would visit her little darling to show him once again the poor little mouse who was scared and sweating.

Mama always pretended then that she didn’t know him. And dressed up, she was different every time, but Frank was not fooled by that. The dead could be whoever they wanted to be, and they could visit their loved ones whenever they felt like it.

So today she had approached him at the supermarket.

The sound of the shower suddenly stopped. In a moment, she would come and hope that maybe this time, he would play her old game with her again.

If she tried that, Frank would send her away again. Back to where she had come from. When he met her in the supermarket, in a bar, or in the park, he was always happy about it. She was his mother, after all.

But he always hoped that he could invite her for a cognac, just to show her his bungalow and talk to her. So far, however, she had always wanted to play the game at some point and usually wanted to shower first.

He then always made her stop very quickly and took her to the garden afterward.

Maybe she had finally realized last time that he didn’t want to play anymore. Frank was fumbling for the scarf under the bed when he heard the bathroom door open. He hoped she would be wearing something when she joined him in the room now.

Sure enough, she was naked, and Frank was disappointed. She stood there in the doorway, tantalizingly ajar, dimming the light with the dimmer switch (she always did. He would have to replace it with a regular switch) and then, smiling and emphatically slow, began to walk over to the bed.

Before Frank joined her, he glanced thoughtfully through the window into the garden once more. Soon he would have no more room for new raised beds. He resolved that next time he would better invite Mama to a café.