Bam!

Optimus Prime lands a solid right hook. 

Whoosh!

Megatron flies through the air toward Mom’s vase. 

Crash!

Mom’s new flower vase lay in pieces, scattered across the hardwood living room floor. Its former ceramic gloss had slightly dulled; the broken misaligned porcelain patterns stared back at me as I sat, stunned, with a cheap plastic Optimus Prime in my hands. I got it in a Happy Meal last week when Mom made a sale with Jeunesse, and was in one of her better moods. I’ve had Megatron since last year when I called the neighbor’s kid a turd, and he kicked me in the balls. His mom made him give me one of his toys as an apology. Megatron lay in a pile of broken ceramic, his arms limp and unmoving – almost as if he was disappointed in me. Yeah, I’m disappointed in me, too. 

The sounds of food being prepared stop before the kitchen door swings open and I hear Mom’s footsteps approach the living room. She appears in the doorway with her apron still on, her hair tied up. Her eyebrows furrow and her smile disappears, leaving behind a tight-lipped frown as she glances over the living room floor. She sees Megatron lying in a pile of rubble, and I see in her eyes that she understands exactly what happened. Without a word, she walks over to me and slaps me across the face with an open hand. It stings. 

“Get the broom and clean this mess up.” Mom kicks a piece of broken vase toward Megatron. 

“I want it gone by the time I’m done making lunch.” 

She pauses to look at me before walking away, and the sounds of food prep continue. I couldn’t tell how mad she was, if at all. Mom has a kind of quiet anger, the kind that lashes out when I expect it the least. It scares me in the way that a man thrown into a lions’ den would be scared – he sees every twitch of a lion’s paw as a potential threat, every growl as a warning. 

Slowly, I stand up and creep toward the kitchen, where I can smell lunch cooking. Today, it’s Cowboy soup – my favorite. Tiptoeing through the kitchen door, I see Mom standing in front of the stove, stirring the pot and humming to herself. I thought she seemed in a fairly tolerable mood. 

“Hurry up! I’m almost done.” 

She snaps at me without turning from the boiling pot. I quickly grab the broom and run back into the living room. 

“Close the door!”

Her voice, though far from loud, cuts through the air, and I almost slip trying to turn around. Scrambling to my feet, I manage to reach the doorknob and swing the door closed with a loud thud. 

“Don’t slam the door!”

“Sorry.”

Mom’s done with lunch by the time I’ve swept up the broken shards of porcelain. Mealtimes are a silent, somber ritual. I eat slowly, counting the number of spots and stains on our tablecloth. There are fifteen – most of them are from when I spilled or dropped something, and the rest inherited from whoever gave us the tablecloth. Mom eats absentmindedly while looking at past due invoices and bills. Under the dining room ceiling light, her wrinkles and grey hairs are especially noticeable. Worry lines peer out over reading glasses resting on the bridge of her nose, encased by thin dull frames. The temples are held together by rolls of dirty tape that have been there as long as I can remember. 

“Mom, you gave me too much meat. Here, take some.”

I scoop up a spoonful of ground meat, but Mom covers her bowl. Her eyes linger on my spoon. 

“Eat what I give you and don’t complain.”

And that was the end of that. 

“After lunch, we’re going to the bank. Leave your bowl in the sink. I’ll wash it when we come back.”

“Okay.”

Mom’s car is a shiny black Acura she bought last year. Dad told me that there was no way she could afford it without a loan. That is, unless she got her new boyfriend to pay for it again. I remember telling him that she paid for it herself. I don’t think he believed me, but he never brought it up again. 

Mom grabs her keys, and I follow her to the driveway. 

“Get in.” 

I open the rear door. 

“When do I get to sit in the front with you?”

She starts the engine and doesn’t look back at me.

“Next year.”

That’s what she said last year. Without another word, I fasten my seatbelt and roll down my window. Slowly, we pull out of our driveway onto the street. 

Eastwest bank is on the corner of a rather busy intersection between Main street and Palm, which leads right to a Costco two blocks down from the bank. As we pull close to the bank, waiting to turn into the parking lot, I watch as a tall, well-dressed man steps off of the sidewalk and onto the street. His unbuttoned suit flaps behind him in the wind as he walks with a big brown suitcase in one hand and his phone in the other. I can almost see the veins popping on his forehead from inside the car – he’s yelling something into the phone. I almost feel bad for whoever’s on the other end of the call. 

I thought the car behind us was going a little too fast for the narrow road we were on. 

The man had almost reached the other side of the street, but the car wasn't slowing down. I reach out the window and scream at him to run. Too late. 

Crash!

The man goes flying out into the intersection. 

Thud.

It’s a bone-chilling sound. The man lay still on the road, his limbs bent in ways I’d never seen before. A pool of red velvet trickles out from under his suit and pieces of lustrous white poke out from inside his sleeves. Every person at the intersection, whether on the sidewalk or in a car, is looking at the same thing. Nobody dares to even move a finger. 

But what people had noticed wasn’t just the dead body, but the open suitcase beside it. Inside was money – piles and piles of hundred-dollar bills, now scattered from crosswalk to crosswalk. I watch as people slowly walk toward the center of the intersection. People begin trickling out of their cars, gradually inching toward and picking up bills from the street. The corpse is surrounded by toothy smiles and joyous faces as the mob of passers-by gather to line their pockets with the dead man’s coin. 

Horrified, I turn to look at Mom, only to be met with an empty driver’s seat and an open car door.