She's been all over the house this past week and I really wish she would go. She fair stinks it up with her lipstick-tipped cigarettes and the sour lemon drops stuck together in the candy jar. It is not merely that nothing is quite right, but that nothing is ever right at all. Screams at me for leaving the bathmat on the floor and calls me a gypsy slut, refuses to speak to me for a day for calling her a whorehouse proprietor ("ma'am", I'd said), and marks everything I write with red pen. Gives me books she says I am too stupid to understand and dolls I can't play with, their glassy eyes sitting in proxy judgment when she's out of the room.
Over ten years she's been dead and I still don't have a happy memory that I can lay her to rest with, and so she comes swooping in periodically, too much make-up and a housecoat, like an evil Auntie Mame, with her quirky anti-charm. I have no beauty, no brains, no redeeming features, nothing to recommend me. Just in time for Christmas this year, which she managed to bile up when she was alive, and I find myself not wanting a tree, lights, anything, just because it would give her one more thing to find failing in me.
We shared a birthday, birth order, and red hair, and I am terrified every time she comes around that someday I will turn into her.
tuckova 
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