Mum On Fire

I remember making a shrine in my bedroom as a teenager. Things weren’t working out at college, I was falling behind on my grades, my personal hygiene was slacking, I didn’t have enough pocket money, the cannabis was doing my head in. It started when I was getting stoned for the first time in my bedroom with my mate. He was on the bottom bunk and I was on the top. We’d just smoked a powerful spliff each, and were talking in tongues to each other. My mum appeared at the door, shouting and cursing, saying I was never going to amount to anything and that she wanted me out of the house. She was proper freaking out like, as if I was injecting heroin or something. She was more off her head than we were. I thought I was hallucinating; I thought she wasn’t really there.

“Is my mum really stood there shouting at us?” I asked my mate. We erupted into fits of laughter, she was off on one. She revealed the home family photo album – only last week I’d erased my face out of all the pictures with Tippex, because I no longer wanted to be part of the family. Well, she’d just found them, and she wasn’t happy…

“What have you done that for you stupid imbecile!” she shouted. The polaroids tumbled through her fingers onto the floor. My mate thought that that was well funny.

“You’ve, like, totally eradicated your family history,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t belong here,” I replied, chonging on the remainder of the spliff.

That’s when my mum went full retard, and started destroying my special shrine. It was a little altar with poems and artefacts, nothing much like, a bunch of laminated bible passages and the like, but it was my most precious possession in the world. There was even a supernatural mask from the joke shop on there. I thought it was possessed by the love of my life. She scrunched it all up and left my room with the mask, so I shot up out of bed, followed her downstairs, battered her, and tried to tear the mask from her clutching hands. In our struggle it ripped an eye socket and this pissed me off royally, so I made a  beeline for the garage where I kept a jerry can full of petrol, came back, and poured it over her.

“Give it me back or I’ll set your arse on fire!” I told her. Now I WAS hallucinating and my mum was looking like a real-life witch. I had thought she was a secret witch for years. My mate appeared next to me, pleading with me that I calm down. But I just wanted the symbolism of the love of my life back. How dare this witch desecrate my holy shrine!

Needless to say, I got done for attempted murder, even though no spark was lit, and sectioned off for a year or so. My mum embellished the story, saying that I tried to torch her with a Zippo lighter. It’s all in the past, and we get along fine these days.