He had kept their mother alive in his thoughts. Too alive perhaps. She clawed at the edges of his skull, the harsh scraping sound prying at his sanity. She twisted her way into any mundane thought she could, filling his mind with every idea of her. She oozed behind his eyeballs, lightly coating them with her essence so that his vision blurred, altered, and faltered away.
He had to get her out.
He tried filling his mind with joyous thoughts of her first, thinking these would quell her machinations. Yet those only seemed to sate her hunger for his energy and she grew more powerful.
He tried emptying his thoughts so that he could find peace and calm in the emptiness. But with the clutter gone, their mother no longer needed to claw or twist or ooze, she just was. And so she grew larger.
His sanity fraying at the edges, he turned to his siblings who only gave him calming words about how it meant he really loved her and wanted to keep her with them. They did not understand. For they had loved her and she them, but this was rarely the case between him and her.
Desperate and half insane, he turned to more magical cures. He drank tonics which only lowered his own defenses as his mother's possession began to take a firm hold. He repeated magical words that made his mother's cackle echo hauntingly through his very veins. He lit candles that only endangered him with their flames for he was too exhausted to calmly prepare the area around them.
Finally, he turned to mythology for help. He found the story of Athena wanting to burst forth from Zeus's head and he wondered if this would do it for his mother. He knew he had to act quickly for his very self was draining away and he felt his mother taking hold.
He now moved as she had moved when alive as though containing a harsh grace. His tastes turned to hers and he found himself desiring acidic foods that roiled his stomach and throat. He only wished to listen to austere music that most would call unpleasant, but their mother had called the only meaningful kind.
He was hardly anywhere to be found.
With the quickly draining stores of himself, he went and purchased an ax and was grateful that the only look the clerk gave him was a confused one and not a questioning one for he didn't know if he could help spilling his plan out.
He went to their childhood home where his siblings still lived, but he had refused to. He begged them once more to aide him, to rescue him, to do anything for him, but they simply said it was all normal grief and he would come out of it soon enough.
Resigned to having to act alone, he asked if he could stay the night and they did not refuse him. Perhaps they heard their mother's tone coming through his voice.
They said nothing of the ax he brought.
Once the house quieted, he went into his mother's room as it seemed the most fitting place to rebirth her. He laid down on her blush colored family heirloom quilt with little lilies stitched into it, dead center. He lined up the ax between his, if they could still be called his, eyes. He raised his arms and brought the ax down with inhuman speed. The whistling edge was the last thing he'd recall.
In the morning, his siblings phoned the police and had his body taken away. They said they assumed it was the grief that had killed him. As his body was removed from the home, their mother stared down at it, unflinchingly from her window.
(Prompt from The Most Dangerous Random Prompt Generator, suggested by Emily Kleeman)
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