Free Bible Camp Bloodbath by Joey Comeau Page B

a much nicer dream. He was planting bushes in his grandmother’s garden, and one of the bushes was actually a lost kitten. The sun was so bright it was almost invisible in the sky. Sometimes you just know things in a dream. Martin dug a small hole in the dirt and planted a dark green bush with wide leaves that was also a lost kitten. It meowed. Meow. Meow. Meow. And then Martin was awake and that repeating sound was his mother’s alarm in the other room. The window was open and it was cool in his room. The alarm kept going. All his blankets were on the floor.
    Martin stood up before he was really awake and stood there for a second. He picked his glasses up off the dresser and dressed for the day. His clothes from last night still needed to be folded and put away. The alarm kept going and for a second he was torn. Should he deal with his mother or fold his clothes? His clothes were just crumpled on the floor. They had to be folded. So he folded fast, but carefully, tucked the clothes into the dirty laundry hamper and then hurried down the hall to the kitchen.
    The table knelt broken in the broken glass. The wooden legs jutted out from underneath it in crazy directions so that the table looked like a baby horse trying to stand up for the first time. Someone - probably one of his mother’s friends - had tried to clean up the glass. They’d swept some of it into a pile against the kitchen wall. A half-assed job. There were still shards everywhere. Martin took the broom and cleared a path to the counter and the fridge, so it was safe to walk in his socks.
    He made his mother tea. No cream. No sugar. The cup rattled on the saucer as he carried it to her room. The more he tried to hold still, the more it rattled.
    His mom was sprawled asleep on the bed, facedown in the pillow, and Martin turned the alarm off and set her tea on the nightstand. She had a much darker room than he did and the shades were always drawn in the mornings. It took him a second to adjust to the dim light. There were shelves and shelves of books against the wall and books stacked on the floor beside them. Martin looked around for anything he could clean up before he woke her. Her clothes were strewn and there was a pile of her special effects books on the end of the bed, by her ankles. Martin folded her clothes and placed them in the hamper. He stacked the books on her dresser beside a broken tube of lipstick.
    On the dresser mirror, in thick red lipstick, his mother had written, “Get your fucking shit together!” and when he first saw it, Martin thought it was directed at him. But it wasn’t. It never was. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. The snake tattoo curled all over the skin on her back, jet black with twists of green. The eyes were looking right at him.
    “Hello,” he whispered to it, and the snake twisted a little as Martin’s mother shifted in her sleep. He kissed the tips of his fingers and reached out and touched them to the snake’s nose. “Hello, good morning,” Martin whispered. The snake’s name was Sicily, like the place. When Martin touched his fingers to Sicily, he could hear the snake slithering, like a slow rasp.
    He liked this part of the day, just sitting with Sicily in the morning, before his mother woke up. It was calm. The sun was out there, but it couldn’t get into the room until they let it. The world hadn’t started yet.
    Martin poked his mother in the back and she groaned and rolled over a bit, but she didn’t wake up. So he shook her shoulder, careful where to grip, not squeezing Sicily. His mother grunted. She opened her eyes and stared at Martin for a second before she realized what was happening.
    Martin looked down at his hands while she wrapped herself in a blanket. Part of Sicily’s tail went around the front of his mother’s body, where you weren’t supposed to look. Martin picked up her tea from the dresser and held it out.
    “Thanks,” she said. It took her a minute to wake up and for a