Mother Vampyre

Her world was forged in cold comfort. As her chained heart hollowed in the bitter hearth, burning in the rage of a trapped, wasted life, her steely hands gripped in anxious, ancient terror the overstuffed arms of the living room chair. Once again she faced the airless, stillborn void where no voice can be heard. With every session her heart fractured and faulted wider. She dare not cry to give her secret sorrow away. But the light was gone. Years of torment awaited her. On the wrong side of 50 she had no place to go, the entire world her prison. Her terror-infected soul collapsed into a black hole, pulling in even the most ordinary of things into its sphere of fear. Long ago she'd perfected the act, a life devoted to appearances, as she slowly died. God's anger encircled her in fire as she refused to leave her house of lovely lies. She earnestly prayed as a person of proclaimed faith not to let the singeing show but now she could she it is going to last the rest of her life, not even the smallest of relief permitted. Her mind sizzled in the encroaching heat, frying its shattered thoughts, unable to connect one moment with the next, her destiny a nursing home vegetable where none of her millions can buy a single coherent thought. Her hologram husband could give no refuge from her angry choice to never live alone in the face of adversarial life. Her stubborn neck stiffened with every passing year, now brittle and bristling at helpless criticism. The thinning lifeline to the children kept her awake at night. They were her precious secret weapons, feeding her, keeping her alive, transfusing animation into her mannequin body. "Be good and live for your mother." But in this too was no future to be found. Was a future even left to be found? Had her stubborn existence played her to be a fool for all eternity? Is this why so many people beg to come back and get it right? The lonely horror of that perception short-circuited her as if she were sitting in her own personal electric chair. Her God was a jealous God, gifting her feelings for freedom she refused to follow, her faith never to flower. Time to depart her fully plucked field.