Pancakes On the Floor

I was eating my pancakes Aunt Jemima’s Buttermilk and Liquid Maple Sugar My mother comes out and stares at my panqueques. She moves stonily around the kitchen floor until I ask her what’s wrong. “Nothing’s wrong.” She answers in a voice that so blatantly defies herself. I persist; but I shouldn’t have. “No really, what’s wrong?” She whips around and repeats with an edge to her voice her volume creeps higher and higher until it’s practically a shout. I look at her with doeful eyes and nod a tiny little nod. I avert my eyes back to my plate where the flat, round cakes can’t admonish me. She asks me a question and I stutter an answer in reply. Her eyes take on fire and she yells, asking why must I stutter? Answer concisely or not at all! She comes over to where I am picks up my plate and throws it across the kitchen. By the time I leave for school there are pancakes on the floor. The next day my father takes down the box of Aunt Jemima and bottle of syrup lays them out on the table and hums a tune while he fries the cakes. My mother goes out to the kitchen and pretty soon I hear shouts and banging Screams of insult and defiance. What will the neighbors think? They were never friendly to start with unknown to me why they ever decided to get married. And many a night, I’ve endured complaints and threats of my mother divorcing my father. Then I hear a familiar sound It’s the sound of a Corelli plate hitting the kitchen floor I don’t want to go out to the kitchen but it’s the only way out. I slink into the living room and creak open the door I try to leave without being seen but before I’m out, I see there are pancakes on the floor. When I return that night the syrup is still standing on the table and the frying pan tilted at an odd angle. The sink is a mess and there is an odd air of finality in the room. I creep into my mother’s room heart beating quickly urging the rest of me to catch up or lose. I lift open my mother’s makeup drawer slide her closet door aside search her underwear drawer. all. gone. I don’t blame her. She was a woman unrightfully pushed past her limits. Stories of the injustice encountered at work would accompany her threats of divorce. No one can blame a woman whose boss yells at her daily, threatens to fire and hire somebody else constantly, and orders her to clean as if she were a maid for him personally. Or swears in her face and then calls the police on her unjustly. She left a copy of a plane ticket on my desk with a note saying the three most treasured words in the human language. On a pink post-it and a heart Underneath it were the two most infamous words in the human language said at every break up and every funeral, two very dark words that signal the end of something. To choose between the two life with my mother or life with my father is a very hard thing to do. I love them both and I cry to Providence why they couldn’t be happy together. My life, the one that has to be torn apart Like a pancake split right down the middle. In the morning I get up and dress Pad out to the kitchen where my father is sitting sullenly at the kitchen table. I retrieve the papers and show him and he sighs and rubs his face. He doesn’t cry; He’s not a man of emotion. Today there are no pancakes littering the kitchen tiles. There is no syrup or frying pan, no yelling mother to reopen an old sore. Instead, There are only teardrops on the floor.