This week’s prompt:

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

—The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

She was just here a second ago.

I was collecting my order, fish and chips for dinner, turned around and she was gone.

I know what people are going to be saying.

Neglectful child.

Allowing a parent to wander off like that. What was I thinking? That was just it, I wasn’t.

I thought I had mother under control. She was fed and watered at regular intervals, she was clothed and sheltered. Her every need I acquiesced to. I was the perfect daughter.

But that was just the beginning of the nightmare. Ten years previous father had gone missing only to turn up in the front bar of the town pole-dancing academy.

It was clear I had a history of losing parents.

I dreaded the knock on my door the next morning.

The one thing I feared was becoming a reality.

The Parent Control Authority.

There were four inspectors, each a foreboding as the other.

They looked down their hooked noses at me. They questioned me mercilessly. They all but accused me of deliberately losing my mother so as to gain notoriety and the lost parent pension.

I protested every accusation, I explained my mother was a happy mum, contented and easy to live with who had everything she needed.

‘We find you a careless child, your mother deserved better care, you will have a black mark against your name.’

I gulped, a black mark?

I knew what that meant. My own children would be horrified. Marked as a ‘careless’ child was condemning you to the bottom rungs of society.

Just then my mother came through the door with a tray of tea and scones. She offered them round to the flabbergasted Parent Control Authority.

As she past me a cup of tea I saw her wink at me and give the cutest conspiratorial giggle.

Written for: https://therattlingbones.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/literary-saturday-prompt-13/