She had woken up in a daze and committed an atrocity.
Beneath her feet lay her mother, face down, bleeding out onto the living room carpet.

They lived in a converted two-bedroom apartment in Zone 5 that was once a church.
Well outside The City, but close enough: two train stations were in walking distance.

Every Friday, they played the lottery.
Bought the tickets from Super Choice, the corner shop fifteen minutes away.
Refreshing the page until the disappointment set in.


The hours in between were some of the best times.
Fantasizing about what to’d do with 48 million pounds.
Maybe get a nice place.
A bigger place.
A much nicer, much bigger place.

She had always dreamt of this moment.
Maybe since she was a child.
When she quit breastfeeding after a month, her first hunger strike.

The hate was already there.
It played with her in the crib.
Burning.

She remembered everything.
The diaper smell.
Wrestling in shit.

The way her mother looked at her, helpless and stupid.
By three, she already understood too much.
And decided then, to kill her mother.

Her early attempts were cartoonish.
Banana peels by the stairs.
Rat poison in the PG Tips.
Even emails to a paramilitary squad in Panama.
Nothing worked.

Besides bloodlust, running was all she enjoyed.
She was the fastest in class.

However, she found school inconsequential and overzealous.
She had friends, but they might as well not have existed.
It didn’t make a difference.

Children were not meant to be nihilists.

Back at home, she experienced penis envy.
Her mother read her own essays aloud to her in the bath,
drinking wine from mugs.

Then cried herself to sleep beside the framed wedding photo, the relic she kept under the bed.
The boohoos were so loud, they’d wake up the neighbour, who’d bang lazily on the adjacent wall.
They couldn’t tell which neighbor it was.

They all looked the same, spoke the same and all drove Hyundai SUVs.

Once, her mother tried to extend an olive branch,
delivering banana bread to every welcome mat,
each with a handwritten card.

None ever sent a text.
Not one even knocked.
But they all ate the bread.

This had sent her mother into such a deep depression, she didn’t leave her room for 3 weeks.
All the bananas rotted in the heat.
The worst of the smell came from her mother’s room.

She made up her mind never to eat a banana again.

The night before she killed her mother, they had passed by Super Choice
but her mother decided at the last second, not to buy the Friday Euromillions.
When asked, she just shrugged.

When they got home, they ate like normal.
The girl in her room and the mother by the dining room counter.
Dinner was cream of mushroom soup followed by Ben and Jerry’s.

Her mother was bingeing the latest season of something on Netflix.
The girl watched videos online.
It was like this every night.

Their apartment on 11 Hillside Close, was built in 2012.
It was bought in 2011 while under construction, so once the deal was signed, there was no going back. That meant the service charge, the ground rent, the stamp duty, the mortgage, and worst of all, the repairs.
Every week, there was a new repairman coming to the house. To fix the sink, then the hole in the sink, then it was the sink in the hole. Each week, a new problem magicked its way into the apartment,
and the fresh Aquaflow PVC piping became familiar.

She slept that night like any other night, but when the Sun came up, her sheets were soaked in blood
and her mother’s body twitched beside her.

God she thought.
This is real life she thought.
Life is interesting she thought.

The corpse was put in the bathtub, and bleach was emptied over it.
Then the last of the bleach was used to scrub the carpet.
It was an hour of back-breaking labour.

The cleaver was made use of.
Black polyethylene garbage bags were filled with limbs.
She paused. What to do about the head?

There would be three trips to the landfill.
First trip: the limbs. Second: the torso and hair.
Third: the head.

She stretched out in the living room, cracking her knuckles, then gathered up the first set of bags,
her wallet, a pack of Paramounts, a lighter,
and a postcard from Disneyland Paris.

Only when she was outside, she realised she’d forgotten her keys.
In this life, she never smoked. Maybe once at a party.
She exhaled. It was her last cigarette in the free world.