Broken Glass and Fake Smiles

"Momma...don't cry. I still love you, Momma." Glittering eyes, olive green, and wide with a mix of fear and uncertainty, look up from under brown bangs, overgrown like the tangled weeds in the front yard.

Chubby fingers, with nails lined in dirt, desperately try to brush back the hair that's matted to his mother's face with her own blood. Tears have carried rivers of her cheap eyeliner across the premature wrinkles in her face, and she tries to hide her eyes from her worried son. "Just go play, Nathan." Her hands lash out, and she chokes out the words, and he's pushed from his protective place beside her bed, landing on the hardwood with a thump.

Tears welling in his round eyes, he stands and heads for the door, "I love you, Momma. I promise." He whispers, brows pulled together, as he stands at the door, taking in her shuddering frame, knees pulled to her chest, and face shrouded in a mess of hair and shame.

Their empty apartment seems to ring with her sobs, as he slinks away from her, head hung and lips quivering. Everywhere reminds him of her pain, their fight, his anger. The hallway, only brings back pictures of her, retreating with blood dripping from her lip, and shutting the bedroom door on him.  The picture frames, thrown from the wall, as she was pinned there, a hand around her throat.

He reaches the end of the hallway, the front door. The shoes, which he'd carefully lined up that morning, eager to please his mother, have been thrown askew, and once again his father's are missing. They always seem to go missing, after they fight. He turns to the living room, now.

Sitting on the floor, weeks of dust and screams caking the carpet, he struggles to keep his tears from falling, as he gathers his playthings up with shaking hands. The armchair, in the far corner, still reclined from where his father sat, is now barren, seemingly too large without the hulking frame devouring it. "Come back, Daddy. Momma needs you." Nathan sniffles, snot and tears dripping from his chin.

With his favorite racecar, the blue one his father had bought him for his fifth birthday, he heads for the kitchen. Stepping over the mess of milk and Cheerios, which he'd been hiding his face in, before his father threw them across the room, he grabs a pen from the overturned cup, and grasps it in a trembling fist. Struggling to make his note legible on the torn piece of paper he'd found on the table, he writes:

"Momma.
I'm sorry you and Daddy fight.
I'm sorry you cry and he yells.
I think it might be my fault.
I hope daddy comes back.
I love you, Momma.
Nathan."

Placing the letter beside a near-empty fruit bowl, he grabs the last brusied banana, and returns to the front door. He slips his feet into his shoes, a torn gray sock, on only one foot, and he pulls the velcro taught. "I love you, Momma." He whispers one last time, hoping against all odds that she'll hear him between her moans and broken sobs.

There's no movement at the end of the hall, imprinted with pictures in his mind, of her frightened face, and shaking frame. There's only the shattered glass from the family portrait, and their torn, smiling faces. That broken family, lost somewhere between broken glass and fake smiles is the last thing he sees, as he turns, and disappears into the night, pulling the door shut behind him.