Night Terrors Vol. 6: Short Horror Stories Anthology

Leftovers

By Warren Benedetto

“Ma, maybe you shouldn’t go out,” Yuri warned, his voice serious. “It’s too dangerous.”

Elena made a shushing sound and waved her hand dismissively, forgetting that Yuri couldn’t see the gesture over the phone. She switched the handset to her other ear as she opened the refrigerator. It was a vintage metal icebox with rounded corners and a curved horizontal handle made of dulled chrome. Blooms of rust scarred the once-white finish. The door swung open with an anguished squeal. It was dark inside.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m just going around the corner.”

The refrigerator’s wire shelves were stacked with cardboard shoeboxes and dented metal cookie tins. Elena took out one of the shoeboxes and carried it over to the kitchen table. The refrigerator door swung shut and latched with a solid clunk. It sounded more like the closing of a car door than a kitchen appliance.

Yuri tried to reason with his mother. “Why don’t you let me bring you something? I can be there in a few hours.”

“Oh, you’re coming to visit? Now you have time?” Elena chuckled. “I feel honored.”

“Come on, Ma. Don’t do that. You know how it is with work.”

Elena sat down at the table. Wisps of her white hair caught the late afternoon sun, framing her profile in a halo of golden light. She had high cheekbones and a strong chin, with eyes that were a striking shade of pale Mediterranean blue. Her skin had the look and texture of finely wrinkled tissue paper. It slid loosely over her bony hands and arms like an old silk garment. She removed the lid of the shoe box. Inside was a kaleidoscopic array of embroidery threads in spools and bundles of every imaginable shade and color.

“Have you made partner yet?” Elena asked as she dug through the box. Her tone was casual, but the question was barbed like a fishhook.

There was a long silence before Yuri replied. “Not yet.”

“Mmm. Well.” Elena nodded. “Someday.”

There was another long pause. Here it comes, Elena thought.

Finally, Yuri spoke.

“Promise me you’ll be careful?”

And there it is. He wasn’t coming to visit. He never had any intention of doing so. His offer was a charade, his concern merely performative. It was a little one-act he put on for his own benefit, one where he could play the role of a dutiful son, while she played her part as the disappointed-but-understanding mother. It was a familiar show, one she had seen thousands of times before. She’d had a front-row seat for years.

She couldn’t blame him. He had his life: his apartment on Central Park West, his girlfriend from that perfume commercial on television, his job moving money from one place to another. It was a life full of opportunity, full of gallery openings and wine tastings and conversations about Michelin stars and designer clothes.

There was no room for a lonely old woman with cracked linoleum floors and threadbare sweaters with holes in the elbows. No room for the old neighborhood. No room for the past.

Elena knew her son was ashamed of where he’d come from. Of who he was. Of who he still is, she thought with a hint of bitterness. No matter how much he tried to pretend that he wasn’t, like it or not, he was still her son. Her blood was his blood. It was a fact. An undeniable, inescapable fact.