Mum was a frozen thing, like one of those old old mummies they sometimes find buried under thousands and thousands of years old glaciers. But she was my mum. I'm an only child, but she didn't have time enough even for one little girl. Home is where it hurts. She was still warm, the telly on, some documentary about gophers or something, the something or other lives in matriarchal something or others. I stagger out, not because I want to, but because stumbling around is part of whatever's snapped in me. I see him coming but he doesn't see me.
