Pestle And Mortar - Flash Fiction

My mother was a casualty of the war they call life, or life-giving. Sapper me tore her up from inside. Bayonetted trench warfare as I emerged from gerrymandered dimensions of the tunnel complex and out over the top into the light. I detonated into the world. The medics stitched her back together down there, but she was no longer fit for active services to parturition; a pessary to prop up the collapsed sump and berm. Awarded an honourable discharge, with blood clotted me serving as the dishonourable discharge that emerged from her. She wasn’t fit for much in the way of anything. Shellshocked or gassed, it amounted to the same nullity. She regressed in her behaviour even as I advanced. She got down on the floor and played with my sister’s dolls as if they were Action Men. She pulled them out from beneath her skirt pleats like hand grenades and then flung them across the room. I knew they were representations of me and my unwitting violence heaped upon her, unfriendly fire apparently. I enlisted for a permanent tour of Freudian duty, a casualty of war in peacetime as I devoted my unconscious life to reconstructing the fragments of my cluster bomb that had blasted my mother apart.