Chocolate Mousse

The stranger sitting on my kitchen floor has stolen two things from us: a pot of Bubbles of Joy, and my mother’s face. I only know it’s not really her because of the mole swelling out on her nose, in the same place as mine, and the fact mum would never wear a three-piece of such drab black and white.

The stranger grins as she places another spoonful of the mousse in her mouth. Her head cocks back, banging the cupboard door she’s leaning against, but she seems to register no pain. There’s a wealth of blood trickling down the side of her head, splattered over her tie. She probably can’t feel much at all.

It’s the middle of the night—my original goal was to come downstairs for a snack—so my parents are still asleep in their room. I open my mouth to yell.

“Hey!” hisses the stranger. “This is the last pot. Do you want any, or are you going to be loud?”

I quiet. I have the vague feeling that this is the wrong decision, but it’s tempered by a lack of real fear. She seems injured, and my karate instructor has been impressed with my performance lately. A good roundhouse and she’d be down for the count. Besides, she’s not stealing anything of real value.

And I want some mousse.

“Good kid.” She holds a spoonful out towards me.

I wrinkle my nose.

“Right, I forgot that’s how I was.” She reaches up to the drawer beside the sink and drags it open. It squeals. She rummages around inside, rattling utensils so much that she might wake my parents all on her own. She eventually plucks a teaspoon and holds it out to me. She reeks of sweat and warm pennies, and her suit is covered in grey dust like she’s rubbed herself on a building site.

I take the teaspoon, scoop up some mousse from the pot, pause, heap up the spoon a little more, and slip it in my mouth.

“Greedy bastard.” The stranger grins.

It’s cooling and rich, but also a little nauseating on an empty stomach.

“You shouldn’t say bad words in front of kids,” I say.

“You’ll have to grow up faster when you’re around me, then.” She surveys the space. “Was the wallpaper always so cracked?”

I look where she’s looking, absently sucking on the teaspoon. “Been that way for years. Mum says we should hire someone to repaint, but dad insists he’ll do it.”

“Yet he never does,” the stranger says.

“Are all dads the same?” I say.

“Ours are, it seems.” She catches sight of the adjacent living room, as if seeing it for the first time. She eats another spoonful and hands me the rest of the pot, which I scrape for dregs. She pushes to a stand, surprisingly steady on her feet despite all the blood loss.

An impractically bulky device on her wrist beeps.

She inspects it. It flashes orange, lighting her face up like she’s engulfed in flames for a handful of milliseconds at a time. It stops beeping and turns black again. She moves into the living room.

Once I’m done with the pot I twist on the tap. I leave it for five seconds because that’s how long it takes for the brown bits to stop jettisoning out. I then wash the pot and spoons. The spoons I leave on the draining board. The pot I rub with a tea towel and drop into the recycling bag, because my parents have told me it isn’t good to eat sweet things so late.

I follow the stranger into the yellow-lit living room. Beside the box TV there's an ottoman, the lid of which she’s chucked behind her. She rummages through my dad’s vinyl collection. “Aha!” She picks up the single Jolene by Dolly Parton, and extracts it from its sleeve. She strides to the turntable.

“That’s definitely going to wake my parents,” I say. “Have you lost too much blood to think?”

“A sassy thing, aren’t you?” She lifts the stylus, and slots Jolene into place. “Don’t worry; it’s not mine.”

“I don’t have any reason to keep quiet now, either,” I say. “You let me have hardly any of that mousse.”

“I’m sorry for taking it. I think it might be the last one either of us ever eat. But I haven’t had one in so long I just…I wanted to enjoy it. Forgive me.”

Her eyes look wet, now. My heart spikes a little, not only because she appears mentally unwell, but also her injuries don’t seem to hinder her as badly as they should. She would take more than a single roundhouse.

She rests the stylus on the vinyl, and it begins to play, as a whisper at first, but she actually turns up the volume and clicks her fingers to the beat. The audio is crackly, unstable. It reminds me of a spaghetti Western, artefacts of age dashing across the screen. It seems to transport her even moreso as she closes her eyes and dances about the room, not crashing into anything, as though she can navigate by memory.

I glance towards the staircase. There’s no footsteps. Parents are still asleep.

The stranger’s device beeps again, flashing orange. She doesn’t look at it this time.

“Are you my mother from an alternate dimension?” I ask, recalling the comics the boys at school sometimes show me.

She laughs, finally opening her eyes. “Is that who I look like more?” She picks up a framed photo off the coffee table. It's of my family together, me as a five-month-old. She studies it. Her hips continue to sway as though she’s dancing with us. “I suppose it is.”

“Are you from the future?” I say. “Are you–” I pause a while. “I would never dress like that.”

She cackles. Still, no sign of my parents. “Uniform’s a uniform’s a uniform,” she says.

“Why are you here?” I say.

She glances at the turntable. “Vinyls do eventually go out of fashion, you know. A lot of us never thought we’d see the day. Human rights fade away with less of a bang, but perhaps those were never in fashion to begin with. Bubbles of Joy last another…ten years, maybe? Cadbury as a whole go under after fifteen, cannibalised by a company that gets cannibalised by another, until the same people that pave our roads are manufacturing our chocolate and policing the timeline so it stays just as shit as it’s always been.”

“Stop swearing,” I say. “It makes you nasty.”

“If you had to choose between a polite man starving countries and a woman who swears occasionally but feeds everyone no matter their creed, their social status, their whatever, who would you pick?”

“You can be kind and polite at the same time,” I say.

“Touche, my young padawan.” The device beeps orange again. She glances at it, heaves out a sigh. “I’m so tired. Worse things than to be than sleepy, I suppose.”

The song fades. The living room is plunged into silence, but for the drip of the tap; I must not have twisted the knob tightly enough. “I think I’m going to go back to bed now,” I say.

The stranger shakes her head, slowly. “I don’t recommend that.” She’s still swaying despite the quiet.

“I have school tomorrow,” I say.

She considers this a while. I think of adopting a fighting stance, but my arms won’t move. I’m as stiff as a brick, shoulders tensed up, heart’s hammering the only evidence that there’s any life left in me.

“Okay,” she says. “But you have to promise me you won’t see mum and dad until the morning.”

“I won’t,” I say.

“Say the magic word.”

“Please?”

She giggles. “I mean promise me.”

“I promise,” I say.

She nods. “Go.”

I walk to the stairs, and sneak up them. There’s no real reason for me to be quiet; the stranger knows I’m there, and I intend to wake my parents up. Yet quiet I remain.

Once I’m at the top, I peek open my parent’s door, and slip in.

Minimal light washes in between the curtains from the street lamps, so it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. I’ve been in their room enough times to know how to navigate to the bed, though, so I start in that direction.

I step on something along the way. It’s cold and rubbery, even a little hairy. I pause, retract my foot.

When my eyes do adjust, the room’s a mess. The bedside lamps have been knocked to the floor, one of their bulbs shattered into glinting fragments. Cricket bats, usually kept in the corner, are strewn across the bed, their ends bloodied. The photos on the wall are all askew—the glass on one of them, a photo of me playing violin in the school orchestra, has a sprawling crack that originates in one of my eyes, as if I’d caused some supernatural schism in the hall around me.

I look down. It’s my mum’s arm that I’d stepped on; I know because she has her real face, without the mole I have, and she’s dressed in her satin white pyjamas with pink roses sweeping up them. Much more her style.

I nudge her shoulder. She doesn't move.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” The voice behind me holds genuine remorse. “There’s a reason why adults tell you to promise them things, though I suppose I always did have my rebellious streak.”

Internally, I scream for my arms to adopt fighting stance again, but despite two years of developing the so-called muscle memory my karate instructor keeps ratting on about, I’m frozen in place.

I look around. My father’s foot sticks out from under the bed.

A hand caresses my cheek, and I don’t even have it in me to recoil.

The stranger kneels beside me. “Listen to me real careful, now. History’s about to change in ways that, even with all the planning in the world, I could never predict. And it's going to keep altering until I’m done. What I do know is this: when the status quo stops working, it needs to change, and if we don’t budge it over, then who fucking will?”

A beeping. The device on her wrist flashes lime this time. The light makes my mother look sickly.

The stranger begins tapping the screen. There’s a sound around us like air rumbling out of a kettle. “I like to think dad really did intend to repaint the walls,” she says. “Life just…gets in the way of these things.” She turns a knob on the side of the device.

I act on instinct. I curl up a fist and hurl it for her solar plexus.

She’s smiling and crying before her whole body is sucked in a spiral into a single point, and she dissolves into nothing.

I’m left alone in the trashed room, punch held mid-air.

Useless.

Downstairs, the tap continues to drip in the empty house.