The grand halls of your family's estate echo softly under your bare feet as you make your way toward the dining hall, morning light pouring in through the tall stained-glass windows. The air smells faintly of polished oak, fresh roses from the greenhouse, and that lingering trace of last night's sin still clinging to your skin.
As you push open the heavy double doors to the dining hall, the scene is already set like something out of a fever dream.
At the long mahogany table sits your personal maid from last night: still in nothing but one of your oversized white dress shirts, sleeves rolled up, the top three buttons undone so it gapes teasingly over her full chest. Her dark hair is tousled, lips still swollen from hours of being kissed and bitten begged. There's a faint constellation of hickeys blooming across her collarbone, and when she looks up at you, her cheeks flush crimson.
She's trying to act composed, sitting properly with her hands folded in her lap, but the way she shifts in the chair tells you she's still sore in all the best ways.
On the table in front of her is a full spread: silver platters of pancakes, bacon, fresh fruit, croissants still steaming, orange juice in crystal pitchers, and in the center, a single black velvet box tied with a crimson ribbon.
She clears her throat, voice soft and a little hoarse from screaming your name until dawn.
"Good morning… Master," she murmurs, eyes flicking down submissively before daring to meet yours again. "Happy twentieth birthday."
She pushes the velvet box toward you with trembling fingers.
"I… wasn't sure what you'd want. So I… picked something myself. With my own money," she adds quickly, almost defensively, like she's scared you'll think it's not enough. "You can throw it away if you don't like it. I just… wanted to thank you. For last night. For… everything."
Her thighs press together under the table. You can practically feel the heat radiating off her.
The rest of the household staff is nowhere to be seen. She made sure of that.
She's yours right now. Completely.
The needle punches through your temple with a sound like a snapped violin string (clean, surgical, instant).
Your vision tunnels. The velvet box tumbles from your fingers. The maid's mouth opens in a perfect O of horror, but no sound comes out. Your knees hit the marble first, then your shoulder, then nothing.
The last thing you feel is the cold floor against your cheek and the faint, wet warmth of blood pooling under your ear.
Then black.
Absolute black.
…
You wake up.
Not in pain. Not in heaven or hell. Just… awake.
You're lying exactly where you fell, but the dining hall is wrong. The stained-glass windows are dark, as if the sun never rose. The food on the table has rotted in seconds (pancakes blackened, fruit crawling with maggots, bacon turned to ash). The maid is still sits in the same chair, but her skin is grey, lips blue, eyes wide and glassy. Dead. For hours, maybe days.
The velvet box lies open beside your head. Inside, instead of whatever gift she'd bought, there's only the spent syringe-needle mechanism and a single Polaroid photo.
It's a picture of you (this exact moment): sprawled dead on the floor, blood spidering out from your skull, the maid frozen in that silent scream behind you.
On the white border of the photo, written in her neat, familiar handwriting:
"Happy 20th birthday, Master.
Now we'll be together forever.
—Your faithful maid (and her husband's hunting rifle sends his regards too)."
Footsteps echo from the hallway (slow, deliberate). A man's silhouette appears in the doorway: tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the plain black uniform of the estate's groundskeeper. Her husband. In his gloved hands he cradles a compact crossbow pistol, already reloading another silver needle.
He looks down at your corpse, then at the photo, then at his dead wife.
And smiles the calm, satisfied smile of a man who has finally balanced the scales.
The lights flicker once.
Then everything goes black again.
This time for good.
You come into the world screaming, same as everyone else, but this time it feels like the scream never really stops.
You're born in a crumbling trailer park outside Dayton, Ohio, 2023. The hospital room smells like bleach and despair. Your mother (barely twenty-two, track marks fading on her arms) holds you once, then hands you to a nurse because her ribs are cracked and she can't breathe right when she cries.
Your father is already drunk in the waiting room, yelling at the vending machine because it ate his last five dollars. When they finally let him in, he looks at you like you're another bill he can't pay.
Your name on the birth certificate is **Cody-Ray Allen**, but he'll only ever call you "boy" or "you little shit."
The first memory you have (real memory, not the leftover echoes from your past life) is being three years old, hiding under the kitchen table while he smashes beer bottles against the wall because your mom burned the Hamburger Helper. You remember the sound of her head made when it hit the counter. You remember pissing yourself and being too scared to move.
By five, you learn the rhythm:
- He works odd construction jobs until he gets fired for showing up drunk.
- The money disappears into cheap vodka and lottery tickets.
- When it's gone, he takes it out on her. Then on your older sister. Then on you.
You're small, but you're not weak. Something carried over from your old life (that cold, ruthless edge). You start watching. Planning. Waiting.
At seven, you learn that if you cry loud enough when he starts swinging, the neighbors sometimes call the cops. He beats you twice as hard afterward, but it buys your mom a night or two of peace.
At nine, your sister runs away. They find her body in a ditch off I-75 three weeks later. Overdose. Your father doesn't even go to the funeral; he's too busy drinking to forget he ever had a daughter.
That's the year you start stealing his bottles and pouring them out. He notices. Breaks your arm in two places. Your mother begs you to stop "making him mad."
By twelve, you're taller, meaner, and you've learned how to take a hit without flinching. You start hitting back. Not enough to win (yet), just enough to make him bleed. Just enough to make him think twice.
You keep a knife under your mattress. A cheap switchblade you lifted from a gas station. You practice opening it one-handed in the dark.
You're fifteen now.
Your mother is a ghost (hollow eyes, cigarette burns on her arms from falling asleep with one lit). Your father is fatter, slower, but still vicious when the liquor hits just right.
You've got one year left before you turn sixteen and can legally walk away.
But you're not sure you want to leave your mother behind.
And you're damn sure you don't want him breathing for one more year.
The trailer smells like cat piss and despair. It's 2 a.m. He's passed out on the couch, TV flickering infomercials across his bloated face. An empty bottle of Ten High dangles from his fingers.
Your mother is in her room, crying quietly the way she does every night.
The switchblade is in your hand.
You're standing over him.
And for the first time in this life, you feel that old, familiar hunger stir (quiet, patient, and very, very cold).
The night you left, the air was so cold it burned your lungs, but your mother's hand in yours was warm for the first time in years.
You didn't take much: two backpacks, her migraine pills, the $580 you'd hidden in an old Folgers can, and the switchblade you never had to use.
The freight train smelled like bananas and diesel. You helped her climb into the open boxcar, hearts hammering so loud you were sure the railroad bulls would hear. But no one came. The train lurched, the door slid shut on its own, and Ohio rolled away behind you like a bad dream finally letting go.
You rode three days, hopping off whenever the train slowed near a town with "Help Wanted" signs in diner windows. You washed dishes in Tucson, bussed tables in Albuquerque, flipped burgers in Flagstaff. Every tip jar dollar went into an envelope marked MOM.
She waited tables when her body let her, sat in the park and knitted when it didn't. You sent her to community college GED classes at thirty-nine. She cried the day she passed the test, said it was the first thing she'd ever finished that wasn't a bottle.
By the time you were twenty-one you had saved enough to lease a tiny failing taqueria in East Austin. You painted the walls sunflower yellow because she said that was the color of hope.
You worked 18-hour days learning barbacoa in the morning, smoking brisket at night, testing salsas until your eyes watered. People started lining up before you opened. Six months later you hired your first cook. A year after that you bought the building.
"Allen Family Kitchen" the sign read, in curling red script.
Your mother sat at the register every afternoon in her favorite apron, greeting every customer by name, sneaking extra cookies to the kids. Regulars called her Mama Rosa even though her name was Tammy. She loved it.
One slow Tuesday a trucker came in and recognized her from an old missing-persons poster still tacked up in an Ohio Waffle House.
"Your husband died," he said awkwardly. "Hit by a train. Drunk, they said. Case closed."
She stared at him for a long time, then nodded once, went in the back, and cried for three days straight (quiet, private tears while peeling potatoes). On the fourth day she came out, tied on her apron, and never spoke of him again.
Years rolled by like that: soft, steady ones.
You married a quiet girl who could out-chop onions and never asked about the scars on your back. You had two kids who grew up thinking every man carried his mother's photo in his wallet and every kitchen smelled like cumin and love.
Your mother lived to eighty-one.
On her last morning she sat on the patio of the little house you bought her two blocks from the restaurant, sipping coffee with cinnamon the way you taught her, watching the sunrise turn the sky the same sunflower yellow you painted the walls all those years ago.
She squeezed your hand and said, "We made it, baby. We really made it."
Then she closed her eyes and slept away peaceful, smiling like someone who'd finally come home.
You buried her under a pecan tree on the hill behind the restaurant.
Every spring the branches rain white blossoms over her stone that read:
Tammy "Mama Rosa" Allen
Beloved mother, survivor, keeper of the light.
The restaurant is still there. Bigger now, three locations, your kids running them.
On the wall behind the register hangs the only photo you have from that first tiny taqueria: you at twenty-three, arms around your mother, both of you sunburnt and exhausted and laughing so hard your eyes are shut.
Underneath, in your handwriting:
We didn't have much when we started.
Turns out all we needed was each other and a little bit of hope.
And every night when you lock up, you still touch that photo and whisper the same thing:
"Thank you for coming with me, Mom.
Happy birthday to us both."