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his mother, still in the living room.
    She remained silent. But he knew how she hated it when he criticized her housekeeping skills.
    The bread popped up, the odd smell of burned bread and cooking mold wafting into the air. Barrett took a dirty plate from the stack near the sink and dropped the hot bread on it. Looking in the fridge, he found a plastic container of margarine, but the contents of the tub were black. Barrett looked at it and sniffed it before deciding to eat the toast dry.
    Besides, he had to get moving. Today was a special day. “You might want to do some grocery-shopping, too,” Barrett said as he carried his toast from the kitchen into the living room. His mother continued to sit stiffly in her chair in front of the silent television. Usually she would say that he was picking on her. Picking on her, he thought as he munched on his toast while he stood beside her chair. He was picking on her when he suggested that she might want to do a little bit of cleaning, or maybe a little bit of shopping. He stared at her, wondering what she thought she was doing to him when she complained that he worked too much, and that he needed to find a nice girl to marry and give her some grandchildren. His mother just couldn’t understand that his students were his children, and really, his job was his wife; that he was totally dedicated to both.
    He took another bite of the toast, finding his thoughts drifting back to that day again, and how the horribleness of it all had seemed to flow into the night as well. He and his mother had been watching television, in between running to the door to dole out candy to trick-or-treaters. He hadn’t told her that he had been let go, hadn’t been able to find the right words. Besides, she’d been transfixed on one of her foolish paranormal reality shows— Spirit Chasers —convinced that it was all the God’s honest truth. They’d had many an argument about those TV shows, and she’d usually ended them by shushing him quiet and saying it wouldn’t be on television if it wasn’t true. Sure, as if television couldn’t lie.
    He’d planned to wait until her show was over before finally telling her that he’d been let go, but he just couldn’t wait any longer. Barrett ate the last of his moldy toast, watching his mother, remembering how she’d reacted. He wondered if it would have been different had he waited until a commercial break, or until the show ended as he’d originally planned.
    Instead he’d blurted it out, standing in front of the television.
    She’d screamed for him to get out of the way as he’d bared his soul and sadness to her, not sure he’d ever get over the devastation of it. But he had gotten over it, that very evening actually. It was right after she had shown him her true face. His mother had always been cruel, but that night she took her cruelty to another level entirely.
    She’d called him a failure, telling him that if she’d known when she spent twelve hours in labor with him what a disappointment he would be, she would have visited the abortionist and saved them both a lot of misery.
    A part of him still wanted to believe that his mother hadn’t meant what she’d said, that she was just annoyed because he was interrupting her television program. But he knew her, and he knew that she very likely had meant every hurtful word.
    Trick-or-treaters had been knocking at the door, and people screamed on the television behind him, when Barrett had gathered his courage and strode toward his mother, demanding an apology. Instead she’d just leaned sideways in her chair, telling him to get his failure of an ass out of the way, as her clawlike hands tried to push him to the side. She’d demanded to see.
    And he had shown her.
    He had shown her the depths of his despair, the sadness, and the rage.
    He’d grabbed a handful of candy corns from a bowl beside her chair. He’d always hated those things, and she used to tease him about making him eat all the