In Laymon's Terms

Rain would be bad. The ground was still loose, despite his attempts to pack it down. The rain would break up the soil, bring her remains floating to the surface, a head here, a foot there...didn’t bury her deep enough, should’ve been more careful...

Entering the company lot, Leonard’s runaway paranoia train was nearly derailed by a collision. With a Mercedes, no less. Fiesta vs. Benz, clerk vs. VP—the loser, on all counts, would be me. Again.

Leonard ducked lower in his seat to avoid the heat-seeking glare of the other, executive-level driver. Killed my mother, wrecked my car, lost my job—not my week. Leonard struggled to control a sudden attack of giggles before they became uncontrollable hiccups of hysteria.

Taking a last look at the bunching clouds, Leonard flashed again on the carefully detailed disposal of his mother’s body, a process that had kept him up all night. Not that he could have slept anyway.

He’d spread Mother far and wide in the field behind the house, drawn pentagrams in the dirt over each spot, then finally burned her various nefarious possessions. Just like it had said to do in her books. Just the way he had planned it. All the precautions had been taken; everything required to prevent her from coming back had been done.

But it was hard to remember exactly what the books had said. There were so many of them, each seemingly filled with conflicting wisdom, advising on everything from potions to poisons, from familiars to phases of the moon. And it all tended to run together in his mind—although it pained him to admit it, Leonard had to admit that his research on safeguards against Mother’s reanimation had been less than meticulous. In truth, he had recalled as much as he could, and...extrapolated the rest. At least he’d been careful to commit the act precisely at midnight—he was pretty sure he remembered reading something about that.

In spite of whatever hindsight doubts might plague him, the plan had worked. Leonard was sure. There was no way she could come back from what he had done to her. Her parts were scattered across the back field like a long summer’s worth of pollen.

Once safely inside his work cubicle, though, Leonard wound up staring at his monitor in a numb fugue, fingers occasionally crawling over the keys with all the vigor of two slowly expiring spiders. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he held a vague hope that his stupor was not too noticeable to his co-workers. In a more lucid moment, Leonard would have realized that he needn’t worry. To his fellow employees he held all the visibility, and attraction, of a social disease that stubbornly refused to go away. A lifetime of Mother’s ministrations had left Leonard a collective vegetable, unable to function in social situations, a complete turnip in front of a group.

Thankfully, maintaining a reasonable facade was the extent of Leonard’s cover-up duties.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about publicly covering up Mother’s disappearance.

Happily, she’d been a recluse for so many years that hardly anyone knew she existed anymore.

Luckily, he’d had the means to dispose of her in the necessary way.

It was all good.

Leonard’s worries really were few, because as far as neighbors, acquaintances, and the rest of the world were concerned, dear Mother was a name on a mailbox, and nothing more. She hadn’t left the house in several years. In fact, Leonard felt there was a good chance that an entire decade had rolled by without Mother’s stubborn jaw being struck by the light of day. A few co-workers and neighbors probably vaguely recollected from brief, awkward conversations with Leonard that he still lived with his Mother, but no one had laid eyes upon her emaciated hag-frame for a long, long time.

The failure of anyone to miss his Mother was perhaps the only benefit of her extended, self-imposed hermitization. The downside of her internal exile, on the other hand, was indeed a steep slope, for her self-imposed seclusion meant that Leonard had been the sole subject of her perverse whims and desires. He’d tried, when he was younger, to run away, and later to simply move out, but Mother would have none of it. She’d tracked him down and forced him to return home, all without ever actually leaving the house herself. Whatever else he felt about his Mother, Leonard had to admit that her powers were indeed impressive. He refused to even think about the time he’d tried to burn down the house, and her with it. The weeks of Mother-induced agony that followed were more than he could bear even to recall.