The phone rang.

She saw the number and looked out onto the chaos erupting below, instantly comparing it to the relative calm within the space she’d  temporarily made for herself.

“It’s because she can smell the peace,” an aspect of Lyra muttered as she unfurled from her self. “If she can’t ruin it she’ll try to ruin your experience of it.”

“But it’s up to you if she can,” another aspect whispered as she made her way out of her root self. She sounded slightly cheerier than usual.

“Why so non-glum¿” the smart ass chortled as the smartphone continued to chime behind them. “If you don’t answer that she’ll just leave some toxic earworm that we’re gonna erase without listening to, which will kick off all kinds of other bullshit…but the breech and foothold on this peaceful shore willstill energetically count-”

“Not glum because… today’s the day-” she grinned.

“The hell you say-”
“Nope-it is… look at her, she’s paying us no mind. That’s the tell-Look!”

She censured her slightly shocked selves inside, out and picked up the phone.

---

Frustrated sobs broke against her eardrum as her mother began to openly wail as though she were carrying a bloodied child left at her doorstep in her arms.

“Oh my god!! You finally picked up your -I thought your attention was somewhere more important than anything I could Ever possibly-” her mother sighed melodramatically. “I thought you were gonna send my call to voicemail! Or let it just go -” her mother cried out indignantly.

“GRAY ROCK!GREY-” the smart aleck yelled as splinters of herself flooded into the arena. 

The territorial infraction being forced upon Lyra in the aftermath of her having walked out her decision to be kind to herself (by disengaging from familial nonsense sans any announcement to the world to get said decision approved )was the reddest of code reds.

The adrenaline flooded aspects of herself that’d been up to other things in the ecosystem before the bells were shushed by the aspects already present, then shooed to their respective seats.

Lyra remained quiet as her mother carried on, long enough to make it awkward.

Her mother paused, then the vitriol crawled back into the outskirts of her voice. “You’re not even Going to ask me what’s- troubling me?!” she spat offscreen, unable to deal with the venom that should’ve sank down into her daughter’s neck by now instead of circulating for what it was within her own mouth. “You haven’t reached out to me in ages! And when I finally Lower myself to reach out to your arrogant ass, obviously dismayed and out of order, you have Nothing to say, not even a-”

Her daughter sat in direct view of the camera, implacable.

“Who the fuck did I raise that can be this fucking cold to her own moth-” Lyra’s mother droned on, wounded.

“What do you want?” her daughter asked plainly.

“Oh! What do I want?! What do I want? Besides respect?!  You mean beyond a little motherly fucking concern? You mean on top of wanting my own daughter to care enough to-” her voice hitched in her throat. “Why don’t you ask me what’s actually happening to me that would make me Have to even call you, of all people-?” her mother snarled. The silent observance of Lyra had somehow boomeranged her own vitriolic vibration back onto her and the sensation of her own spiritual force ran roughshod up against her, as if ready to rip her limb from limb.

“Nothing happening To you would make  you call me-” the woman muttered, then looked out the window at the riots below. The mother’s jaw momentarily went slack in shock at the offer of nothing for her to hold onto given. No leeway, no complaint, no question.

The jocular aspect of Lyra popped up to take matters into her own hands in hopes of sniffing this matronly attack out before it fully swung into gear but Lyra gave her well-meaning yet wayward self a look that stopped her dead in her tracks.

Regrouped, Lyra’s mother began to sob again.
“It’s my sister, she’s gone!”she wailed. 

Lyra had three aunts. They all treated their female children ten, fifteen and twenty years older than her just like Lyra’s mother behaved towards her, and all three had been dead to Lyra sans any pomp and circumstance, soon as she’d heard what their motherly jealousy towards their own offspring had rained down upon her cousins.

Her child gave her nothing. 

“She’s dead, Lyra!” her mother screamed. “And that fucking niece of mines-your fucking cousin-”

”Which cousin? The one your sister’s second husband tried to assault that she decided to still stay with?” Lyra asked for clarification.

Her mother froze.  “That’s not how that happened- not that-” she fussed. All attempts at fake tears evaporated from her weak willed performance.

“Oh! OH! I must be…Thinking of -” Lyra chirped, suddenly animated, “You mean your Other sister whose husband raped his own daughter? The auntie who not only still stayed with him, made her kid the villain and called him her best friend until he died…but also then proceeded to mentally abuse her own kid for years, until that cousin protectively  blew up to over 300lbs and all of you shamed her for it on your sister’s behalf-Do you mean her?” Lyra asked darkly.

“YOUR other Aunt, my half sister… fucking died…in the care of her oldest child …a fucking Month ago and I just found out, you fucking spoiled brat! Yeah! How do you feel now, smartass?!” she raged.

“Because iiii feel horrible! You know why? Because I don’t even know where my fucking sister is ! Your fucking cousin won’t tell Anybody Anything else! Is she buried in an unmarked grave? Cremated!? Nobody knows but her! Not even her fucking siblings!” Her mother wailed.

“Did she have issues with those kids growing up? Sure! But we all gave all you thankless spawn everything! All the stuff we didn’t have, and then some! And what did it do? Where did it leave us!! I mean Her!! What good did it do my sister!? What good did all that giving do her? And you wanna sit here judging her for what-Have you no empathy!”

The aspects of the woman raced through the annals to get a pin on which elder cousin had popped off as she snapped her fingers on cam trying to recall her.

“Ooooh!Got it!” The smart aleck chuckled and held up the military portrait photo of her cousin 16yrs her senior that’d she had only met twice. A woman who, after surviving her own despot of a mother, had breezed through bootcamp and various ranks within the Marines, never to be seen in their familial hometown again.

“Wait- Hyacinth? How the- how did She end up her caretaker? What about those two golden boy brothers of hers who’d molested her? Only for her to be all but hung for retaliating against them after her mom let them off the hook?!”

“Hey! That’s not- how do you even-” the mother’s mind raced away from the fact those were indeed the details. “ Look! Unlike you! I don’t try to keep straight all the dirty- I don’t know! They didn’t… Hya…” Lyra’s mom paused. “They tracked down Hya after having found her wandering the street half dressed,” he mother sniffed. “Her boys … were supposed to be looking after her- they’d… gotten power of attorney and…but they just had…”Lyra’s mother looked almost ethereal as she described what she knew, “liquidated…damn near everything, left her to live in squalor-” her mother’s  voice trailed off. “Hyacinth- she’d…she Tried to poison them as kids! I mean…” 

Lyra snort laughed.” I heard she didn’t try, she did antifreeze them all, like the evil fucking dogs they were- but then…you know how that goes, right mom?”

All the color drained from Lyra’s mother’s aghast face at the all but unveiled accusation.

“Oh! Now’s the time to bring up that fucking dog of yours that was always growling at me?! Not that I did it! It was totally our neighbor,” she waved it off.

“It wasn’t him. I asked him and he was horrified-”

“Of course you did, and of course you believed him over me!”Lyra’s mother wailed.

“You admitted you did it, mother.”

“I did no such-”

“ You admitted when I was twenty five. Ya did it, said fuck that dog. It’s not even important-” Lyra sighed.

That the woman had poisoned her ex-husband’s and daughter’s dog when Lyra was just thirteen so nothing would be left to love her other than mommy dearest once her parents’ divorce was finalized had been the thing that had set Lyra free enough to see all those years ago.

She’d known then that she’d never be safe alone with this woman, unless she was willing to kiss the ring or kill her. So she’d began figuring out how to leave. She had been gone by the tail end of her seventeenth year.

“I understand now,” Lyra said softly as her mother bitched and moaned to herself on camera. “You’re not reaching out to me to hold your hand over your dead half sister.  I know you. I’d bet money You probably haven’t even seen her in over a decade. Am I right?”

Lyra’s mother glared wordlessly at her.

“So the fawning about tombstones and Graves that you know I know you’d never pony up the cost of for anyone, not even that mother of yours you actually loved- even she had contingency plans in place to cover her burial shit because she knew your-” the woman paused. “tendencies,” 

Her mother looked like a dear trapped in headlights.

“No no no… you’re reaching out…because YOU…You want…assurances. From me. Regarding… what you know your sister deserved- which it sounds like she got, versus what you know you deserve- when it comes to…me-” the woman murmured.

The mother’s mouth became as dry as the Sahara as she took in the child who’d, to her chagrin, consciously chosen not to be the monster she had tried to shape her into being. She felt the sickening twinge in the pit of her belly and realized for the first time since her sweaty hands had groped for the headset to initiate the call that she’d actually reached out solely …in hope. 

Independently inspiring the now grown Lyra, who’d walked away from her so easily after all she’d done, to circle back with no sheen of the alien, distant civility protectively intact around her any longer, a respectability that had marred the mother’s sense of self in relation to her, was her last will and testament request. She was here begging to have given birth to a monster that mirrored the one she’d been. To make all of it worthwhile as she watched her creation put her out of her misery.

“You know, mom…” Lyra murmured. It was the first time she’d called her mom in over three decades. “I got… the psychopathy with you,” she fluttered her fingers up and off the screen dismissively, as though to her, the ‘mental illness’ now cowered behind in old age was but a cover, a moth, “because I.. grew IN you, and up Under your thumb, best as you could manage to keep me-”

“Look, I didn’t reach out for-you to start mucking around in all the past shit-” the mother snapped derisively as she stood up.

“Shut UP, GALE!!!” Lyra roared, cool lost. “& if you fucking disconnect this fucking call YOU narcissistically forced on Me… all those fucking “nightmares” she air-quoted, “you’re over there obviously writhing with, twistedly turning yourself on with, imagining you and your fucking just desserts at my hands… all the Bullshit You and I both know you fucking reached out to me on will come true  faster than you can get all the way the fuck off due to them!” she seethed.

“We’re doing this…today! By your fucking request!…. Now… As I was saying~” Lyra muttered, calm again.

Her mother’s face became as bright as a strawberry as she angrily sat back down on her seat at home.

---

“Omg- you’re right!” happily hissed the smart aleck aspect to the chipper her. “today’s the-“

“Shhhh~”

---

“Lauren was but a broken tool that you used, aimed, really. A mess in the aftermath of the mindfuck of having been assaulted herself. I got that a long time ago. Her blood is on your hands considering the state she’d been in after what had happened to her at her brother-in-laws hands. You gave no fucks for her-you only wanted to harm me-”

“Ruining everyone was not your intent but giving a fuck about collateral damage has never exactly been a strong suit of yours, now has it?” Lyra chuckled.

“And you were half right about Tess. She was as jealous as I was happily oblivious -and I mean …you’d know an envious ‘sista’ when ya saw one… but the part that never made sense all this time ….was why you decided to spread we were lesbians when we weren’t-”

“I KNOW YOU AND HER- Fucked!” the woman’s mother screeched, triumphantly.

“But not like… Not like the shit your sick ass spread that you knew was gonna get back to me, mom.” Lyra laughed. “Eh, once. In college, when we were like 20 and fucking everybody, like everybody else. It was the 90s,” she murmured. “And it sucked. But the shit you…extolled… that was some sick, sick fucking shit… that you chose to pass around about your own child- Like..fetish-level kink shit. People actually told me, horrified for how You looked, especially after the groupie thing after I’d gone-”

Her mother’s vitriol dropped like a bag of rice to her feet and the woman threw her hands up in the air as her daughter continued.

“The math just …It just didn’t ever make sense, the 2 and 2 and 2… were eschew…until I remembered two things-”

“What now?!”Lyra’s mother yelped defensively. “That I made you cry dropping you off at camp? Or some other wild event that exposes how everyone in your punk-assed generation blames my put upon generation for what’s fucked up with you guys?!” her mother snarled,”We went through hell!” 

“OH, nothing innocuous like that,” her daughter deadpanned, ambivalent to the barbs her mother tossed. “no, I recalled how you said all your friends in school hated you, until you’d people pleased yourself into their highest position. And…how they’d come up to us fake friendly and…marvel at…you…looking so…good…and me…supposedly looking just like you-”

“You DO look just like me-” Lyra’s mother hissed.

“So what, you’re gorgeous,” the woman’s grown  daughter shrugged. “Face card has never been denied. Only one of us two hated How they looked, me and you,” she chuckled. “I have had a ball… but- But the other thing I remembered, the second part of this here particular two… was how you… seriously and weirdly used to make us shower with you- like you’d be late to work just to-”

“We were all-” her mother fussed.
“No Gale…not when we were kids… when we were teenagers, mom. And I always caught you… sizing us- me…angrily…up- and-”

“What the fuck are You saying!?” Her mother roared, flustered. “What are you trying to-“

“Of all the things you could have ‘let’ happen to me as a little girl… I mean… I think you let…no, use your words, right? Effectively arranged what happened…to me… when I was little… because you had a …problem… and then, years later, as you ranted on how jealous Tess was of me…you were weirdly fantasizing…about me and Tess… because it was really you fever-dreaming about You and Tess- or you and someone who…looked like Tess that you never had the balls to…I mean…I think…”

“Fuck you!”her mother screamed. “You’re calling me a fucking dyke?”

“Nah, not just a dyke, a really badly repressed one- I think it’s the one thing missing- it even makes sense of this fantasizing about me… coming and giving you what you think you fucking deserve From me – For me to fucking Fuck you up real good for what you did- I mean…it’s all quasi Freudian as fuck, but… it even explains the phony relationships you always got in for show. It explains you lying to my guy friends from high school for 15 years in regards to my whereabout when you were talking to me twice a week, yet blocking James and them from finding me. It makes sense that all the slander you ran through a town I haven’t entered in years was always weirdly sexual in nature, fucking my female best friend, fucking rock stars I never fucked…you’ve had the strangest… affliction when it comes to what and who is going in and out…of your daughter’s pussy, especially since that daughter barely has spoken to you in eons.” Lyra smiled glibly. “Even your tie-in for the recent shit that, once again, you knew was going to get back to me.” Lyra paused. “But my looking like you…makes all of it all the more…perverse-Your own repressed sexuality makes sense of all the psychopathic tendencies in all this shit when   factored into your…diagnosis-”

“DIAGNOSIS?! Who the fuck do you think you are??! Analyzing me??! YOU CAN’T FUCKING DIAGNOSE ME! YOU’RE NOT A DOCTOR!!! YOU’RE JUST THE KID I… I let get molested because I didn’t give a fuck about YOU-” the mother roared.

“One of them.” her daughter said calmly.

“What??!!-” she screeched. “ONE OF THEM, WHAT?!”

Lyra exhaled evenly. “I said one of the kids YOU…Let get molested. On your ex-husband’s, younger side of your “family” before the divorce. The blood from all my younger cousins who were also assaulted by Lauren… due to Your shit against toddler me…all the carnage of their lives is not just on them and Lauren… it’s also on you.”

“How fucking dare you!” her mother cried out.

“I can diagnose  you. Better than anything else on this fucking planet you’re still mad I Did ask to come to- I reduced you to but a pit-stop portal into and through-” The adult daughter stopped and drank in the bewildered look on the woman’s face as narcissistic collapse whirl-pooled around her. 

“I know exactly what you are. Maybe …in a weird, cosmic way…I, even in full light of the shit I’ve had to fix in my life to not be like you… surely even fucking selected you …somehow… to BE my road in… so that when the time came… to cut my fucking losses…Leaving you behind on the grounds of all you’d done…would be easy as fucking pie. And it took a long time… to make that kind of dark peace… with the likes of you. But by God, I have it-”

Lyra’s mother’s eyes bulged out of her head as everything in her went apoplectic. “You picked a mother who let you get raped as a toddler? That sounds like an idiotic, fucked conscious choice to make-” she hissed.

“But look how easy it’s been for me…to leave a fucked in the head mother like you. I mean…really look at it. Imagine,” Lyra chuckled, “How hard it would’ve been if you’d have a decent bone in your body? Think of all the times your railed that I ruined your body… from this pov… who knows? Maybe I did? In light of what you set up to happen to mines as a child…we’d at least be on the road to even stevens, right?”

“Oh, is that the road you think we’re on?” Lyra’s mother barked.

“I am on no road that has a thing to do with you,” Lyra whispered calmly. “You called me, well aware it was better for you not to, remember? Knowing full well I know what you’ve been up to, No less. Before this… little dissonance over Hyacinth got you…weirdly wet over me all over again- Which makes sense of the diagnosis all the more-”

“Fuck you and your fucking diagnosis, Lyra! I’m not a fucking dyke! I’m married!! Again! Which is more than I can say for you!!”

“You’re worse. You’re a narcissist that only loves herself, and solely in the most self-hate-filled way… and you despised your daughter not only knowing you were not her God, but for looking like you and deciding to enjoy it. You’ve tried to spend my life finding ways to fuck the you that you see in me, a you that rejected you for what you had done to me, thinking it’d make me cling to you.”

“And I don’t care if or what you understand…because I …get you…and...in light of… the example all those horrible sisters of yours set with their kids… and the comeuppance that led you to come to me today, in search of what? Solace? Re-seeding narc supply? …with you sitting there openly itching for me to finish you off , like dying by me will be the best fuck you’ve ever had… and you just want to make sure it’s in play…eventually, like you showed up in search of a fucking promissory note for your last rites or something,” Lyra intimated, “and so oddly, awkwardly orgasmically about it all, too… so…quixotically passionate….that you’d not get the veracity Of the diagnosis coming from me… makes sense. I’m just a lookalike cunt you’ve been obsessed with fucking since birth, ya sick fuck.” 

She looked her mother in the eye with love, erasing the last sketches of the woman from her mind. 

“You’ve been a sick cunt of a mother for a very long time, with no type of honor or dignity towards any kids that survived your orbit.  You’re a pathological narcissist… and you’re also a repressed lesbian who needs to find some adult pussy to lick, instead of ensuring kids around you lick someone else’s. Take it to your team of all paid therapists  to unpack, for all I care… but never call  or reach out to me again, Gale. With this bullshit or anything else. Your other children will not reach out to me when you die. They won’t be able to… because the last of you just died here. Okay? Okay. Thanks for the wellness check. Never call again. Be blessed. Afterlife, or otherwise.  Bye-”

*click*

---

The unfurled aspects of her looked around at each other as shocked murmurs tore through the gathered crowd. 

The murmuring grew to a violent internal roar as residual aspects of the mother that had quietly infiltrated the core as spies stood out glaringly amongst its true corps. 

The battalion of Lyra roughly shoved the interlopers down to the lip of the lymphatic pyre in the bottom of arena in front of the Arbiter of Lyra.

“Yes , I would like help changing my contact information,” she said plainly into the phone balanced between her left shoulder and her ear.

“Yes.  All of it. Every instance, every platform… all at once, if possible. Immediately,” the woman affirmed as she languidly dragged her left index finger from behind her right ear roughly down to her left collarbone.

“No.  Anybody I need to be in communication with I’ll reach out to-” the woman confirmed as the eight aspects that helmed herself alongside the Arbiter pulled the scythes that hung from their hips out, slashed the throats open of the spies of the woman’s own mother within her that could almost pass for the woman herself and hacked them to bits. They gruffly threw the corpses onto the lymphatic fire. 

The crowd of inner Angelic Hosts roared.

“Yes, yes-no, nothing else- great! Thank you- wait, let me grab a pen to write down the new information-”

©AngelBrynner 2025