The parchment of grandiose cursive laid upon the thin paperwork, her birth certificate, proudly declared Vicky as her mother. A mother goose whose assembled body teared with each laborious cry, exuding fountains of perspire and tearful rain.

Once, gentle hands cradled Van's formerly frail figure, and stared moistly at the miniaturized mixture of her. She gazed, then admired, the features she had birthed—a daughter equivalent to gold's value.

Where was that mother now?

At home, snoring the sun away.

Since the confirmed diagnosis, the war between two forces, afore it began, slipped to an unexpected slope. The declivity evoked an immmidiate dictation of who had stomped the other in triumph.

It was cancer.

Mom was a seldom tanker, a combatant, a fighter.

No use of being stupefied when she readily nodded to cancer's invitation of a macabre dance with death. Then came her pills, the swirling cocktails, she drowned in to zoom towards the inevitable.

Her numerous absences amounted to a parental void—a gaping hole only one could fill.

"Come on, take your pick."

Her older sibling.

Only five years apart yet a stalwart figure in her childhood. Lunch boxes were packed with care, jumbled homework unscrambled, and soccer games attended without fail.

You were there when she wasn't.

"Are you sure all this fits your budget?" as a plethora of tantalizing meals sizzled and steamed, their aromas a siren's call to Van's hunger.

Plasticized imagery of food induced a sloppy waterfall descending from her mouth, yet none compared to the real feast laid before her. "All-You-Can-Eat" and "buffet" fueled her stomach, spurring her hands to bank her plate with delicacies costing a limb elsewhere.

"Did you know? Since you left for college," Van confessed between bites, "I've been surviving on frozen meals.

I almost forgot what real meat tastes like."