𝘛𝘏𝘌 𝘌𝘔𝘗𝘛𝘠 𝘗𝘈𝘙𝘛𝘚 𝘖𝘍 𝘔𝘌 - HOZIER

III

THREE.

"You never appreciate anything we do!" A fist slammed onto the dining room table, knocking around half eaten plates of pork katsu and empty glasses of wine. "You've got food on the table, a roof over your head, and a warm bed to sleep in at night! Yet all you do is act like a brat!"

"That's not enough!" The words felt sour, yet familiar off of her tongue. Her head spun with Deja Vu, and her body felt worryingly fuzzy.

"Not enough?" The older woman shot up from her seat, her face reddened with rage with a vein nearly popping from her forehead. "I brought you to this country as a baby- to give you a good life, and it's not enough?"

Her words echoed like a berating chorus, her voice bouncing off of the walls covered in peeling paint. Her gaze darted around the room out of fear, not wanting to settle on the face spitting venom across the table from her. Picture frames hung crooked on the walls nearby, the eyes of the men and women trapped eternally in them oddly blurry.

Pieces of the small house she knew nearly her whole life seemed to be missing; her art from the second grade that she kept hung on the fridge for years, her sister who was always sat at the head of the table, the plates had even seemed to disappear when she looked back to the table; all that was left was the stained yellow tablecloth.

"You- I-" Vivienne stuttered, her face feeling hot and her hands shaky. "I needed love— I needed support, and some fucking help every once in a while!"

"I gave you all of it!" Her mother screamed, her pitchy voice piercing Vivienne's ears. Vivienne pressed the palms of her hands over her ears, overwhelmed with the spinning room and the voice shouting at her from across the table. "I never raised you to be a fucking brat like this!"

"You didn't raise me for shit! I raised myself! You sat on your ass and got drunk!"

The world seemed to slowdown as Vivienne looked up, her eyes scanning over her mothers figure. Her features were almost identical to Vivienne's; eyes dropped with age and lips turned down in a scowl. Her hand grabbed to something in front of her, and Vivienne could feel her chest tighten as a wave of memory came back to her. She meant to duck; somehow change history in her own mind as the wine glass came flying at her—

-

Vivienne woke with a short shriek, shooting up in her bed and kicking her comforter from her legs. Her chest was still tight, rising and falling quickly from her panicked breathing and her hand reached to her face to feel the burning line on her skin. Her fingers grazed over the long scar that cut through her eyebrow and over her cheekbone, the skin stinging like the night it was cut.