Hello and welcome to a new Thursday Taster,
the day when awesome writers all over the blogosphere come together to
give you tasty bits of their last fiction. You can find the list here.
I had trouble to sleep that night. It was the first time my mother had actually slapped me and even if slapping back had been a sort of defense mechanism, I wasn't really proud of myself. Everything went against what I had been taught all my life. I didn't hate her all my life, it had just happened recently. I guess I had been blinded, like everyone else, maybe even more because we were so close and everyone was so happy to say how great a mum she was. I think it happened on the day when we had to fill up the form for university. Of course, I had been talking about it forever but she might never had taken it seriously. I brought the forms back from school and I sat at the kitchen table, looking at all the possibilities in front of me. Everything that the closest university could offer, I felt lucky that I didn't need to go too far away from home to be able to get quantum mechanical classes early in the curriculum.
"What are you reading?" My mum had asked.
"I'm filling up the form for university, there are so many interesting classes to take, I don't know what to choose. I know I want to do physics for a long time now but if I could study tectonic that would be great, that's my favorite topic this year and..."
She had taken the book away from me. For one second maybe, I thought she was interested, that she was going to give me some advises about what to take, that she was going to say not to overload my schedule at first and add classes later if I felt like I could tackle them. But she barely looked at it. She closed it, pilled up all the forms wrinkling the pages and threw it in the bin.
"Set up the table, it's almost time for dinner," she said taking a pan out of the cupboard.
That was it, that was my first serious interaction with a university form and she had just discarded it while I was working on it.
I took everything back from the bin, part of it had sauce on it from the previous night diner and was unusable. She snapped it again from my hands when she turned around to see what I was doing. This time, she teared things apart before putting them back in the bin. I couldn't say anything, I just looked at her unable to really understand what was happening to me.
"I don't want you to get big idea, I already talked with the headmaster of the school I want you to go to and seeing your grade there is no problem, you have been registered there and you can start as usual in September," she said.
"What school?" I managed to articulate.
"Come on Frederique, the secretary school of course," my mother said, "I told you I need an assistant at the office and the company agreed to wait two years until you complete your degree. You'll get a degree in two years and a steady job, that's everybody's dream. Now set the table."
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Ugh.
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