GoT Writings

Week 4, Day 2, Story: Pokemon Go, 18+

Rating 18+ Pokemon Go

Numbness descended. Tammie flipped the phone shut. Tear filled eyes turned to heaven, “Cover Marcy with Your love and protection.” What a senseless way to die. “How am I going to tell Mark?” She forced herself to take each leaden step up the stairs to his room.
Her light tapping went unanswered. To the rustle of movement behind the door she said, “Mark, honey, I have to give you some sad news.”
“In a minute.”
The hurried rustling and covert actions were typical for most teenagers. And on a normal day in June, this open effort to ignore her would not upset her. Today was not that day. The fury was on her before she knew it. “Open this door! Now!”
“All right, all right. Happy now?”
Tammie’s quick scan of the room told her what took so long. Pointing to the phone in his hand, “Is that what was more important than me?”
The kid did not have enough sense not to mock, “Well, yeah, at this moment it is.”
Mark was not expecting such quick reflexes from his mother. She had the iPhone out of his hand before he could hide it.
A quick glance at the screen, Tammie was livid. “What is this freaking thing on your phone?!”
Busted! Mark concentrated on kicking the imaginary pebble on the floor. “Um –“
“Don’t give me that! Why is this on your phone?”
Mark backed away , “Mom, everyone has it. It’s fun.”
Tammie stared at her son in escalating fury. “You better do better than that, Buster.”
“You didn’t say anything when I had Pokemon cards when I was a kid.”
The phone bounced merrily when Tammie slammed it into the hardtop desk, both went after it when it hit the floor – Tammie to bring her foot down on it, Mark on hands and knees to rescue it. Tammie screamed, “We are not talking about you misbehaving as a kid, we are talking about you defying a direct order.”
Mark tried to save the pieces of the phone, but Tammie’s foot smashed his hand. The fury in his teary eyes skewered Tammie’s incensed persona as he cradled his hand. “My hand! I think you broke it!”
“Don’t ever bring that crap in this house again.”
Mark’s muted dull hate-filled voice penetrated Tammie’s wrath. “That was mine. I paid for it. You had no right. Now my hand is broke.”
Sufficiently chastened, Tammie could only utter, “Do you see what that app does? We have never behaved like this. People are getting killed and getting in fights over that stupid app. I don’t understand. What’s more I don’t want to understand.“
“You owe me!”
Tammie took in a deep breath to calm her racing heart and the knots in her stomach. Whatever retort she wanted to say evaporated when the gorge at the back of her throat began to pulsate. Tammie scanned the room quickly. The wastebasket or the bathroom. The wastebasket was closet. Still heaving and working the acrid taste off her taste buds, she questioned, “What is that stench?”
“Vomit.”
That tore it.
Tammie looked at Mark scuttling away, trying to get the phone to work. It told her that not only was his hand not broken, but she was now sure that the phone would never power up again. They say a person gets quite calm when they are beyond fury, that place is called cold fury. Tammie now occupied that space. The calm dull tonality of her voice was palpable. “I came up here to tell you your godfather was run down by someone not paying attention because that stupid Pokemon Go was more important. Now it is more important than your responsibility to this family. You have one hour to get every illegal thing out of this room. You have one hour to make this room compliant with my house rules. You can use that time to pack your bags to go live with the alcoholic, otherwise known as your dad, or to clean up your act. Most people need two seconds to choose wisely, you get one hour. Pokemon Go!”
An hour had come and gone. Tammie sat at the table nursing a cup of now cold, stale smelling, coffee, devising one plan after another, rejecting each as unworkable or insufficient. Losing two people in one day was beyond hurt.
She mentally prepared when she heard Mark’s soft footsteps descending the stairs. This was it and there was no plan. There was nothing. Empty, drained, weary, zapped, they all fit how she felt at this moment.
Tammie took a moment to focus on the contents of the box Mark placed in front of her. “My room’s compliant. It took longer because I had to clean out the wastebasket.”
Tammie fingered each object in the box though they disgusted her. “You’ll stay?”
“If you will let me.”
Tammie patted the hand he had placed on her shoulder before pushing away from the table to face her son. “I want you to stay. Just not with this” waving her hand over the box of contraband. “I won’t enable addictions, been there, done that, no more.”
“I’m done.”
“Pokemon Go?”
“Pokemon went.”
Tammie walked into her son’s open arms, accepting his word that he would no longer screw up …. or at least try not to.

[word count:892]
and "Game of Thrones"