The Witching Hour When The Mafia Return Home

It is what some might call the witching hour, when The Mafia returns home. He unlocks the door, steps over the threshold, then freezes in his tracks. She’s sitting there across the floor in her plush arm chair that faces the door. From this distance he can see the anticipation in her wiggling, sagging jowls. How long has she in her frail, pathetic state waited for him? “Why do you hurt people?” she asks. She’s trying to be strong, there’s a resoluteness in her voice. A long pause follows before she tries again, “Why do you hurt people?” Silence. He can see her stiffen with the cold draft. In one swift movement he steps forward and shoves the door closed. He strides toward her but stops at a healthy distance lest he loses control. In his
Some kind of sadist?”
In the past week, he’d let go a little. He immolated a ballerina bathing herself in sangria, split a lawyer down the middle with an axe, buried some old friends alive, sped through late-night drive-thrus picking workers off, etc. It was a good week, the best in a long, long time.
He shrugs,“I’m not so sure.” Now, his head is cocked to the side and he smiles softly. His wide brown eyes are glued to her nearly hypnotic blue irises. “But rest assured, mother, I am only a reflection of you. Perhaps you can ask yourself the same question.” In truth, he knows they are nothing alike. He’s made sure of that. Once she had been a bright student desperate to study medicine to heal others. But convention caught up with ambition and the dream was sacrificed for marriage and two boys. This sad story of hers The Mafia had heard throughout childhood. It always left him with a smug satisfaction, but one that paled in comparison to the pride he felt when he heard how excruciating his birth had been for her
“I don’t know where I went wrong with you. I loved both of you to the fullest, I served both of you to the fullest. I have nothing to show for my
He remembers his own mother, glances upwards, but suspects she is only dust by now. “Do you really believe there is no joy in life? Perhaps couples who have children are not as hopeless as you. How long have you seen the world this way?”
“Years ago, I had been reading Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo and I asked my brother what he would do if, like Danglars or Fernand, his raison d’être was snatched away by another man? To seize it back would bring upon a terrible vengeance, but to live without it would be devastating”
“Why not ask him what he would do were he Dantès?”
“Anyway, my brother ten-year-old concluded, after much thought, that he would kill himself. I realized then this existence is a zero sum game which has been dressed up for millennia.”
The priest remembers the brother. He sighs out a seemingly endless cloud. “You need help. Go seek it elsewhere. I have my secret family to visit before dark, I have children to tuck in.”
“I don’t want help, father. I want out.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen at your request. Unless you really want to jump off one of the cliffs. Why not do a back handspring, double layout with a half-twist, and roundoff to go out in style? The priest won’t indulge this