12.

Pablo was sitting in the corner facing the wall. His mother, Maria, sat at their dining room table eating a sandwich, and muttering, as she chewed, short quips along the lines of "you little bastard," and "I should never have had you," and "you little rotten bastard." In between the quips, she would take long, loud inhaled breaths that mixed with the tunafish she was chewing on, the type of sound that is a result of taking bites that are too large, coupled with being unable to breathe through one's nose. Her nose became stuffed whenever she was upset, and on this particular day, she was. "You sick little fuck," she said, again, and before she had swallowed what she was chewing at the moment, tore off another bite of her sandwich.

Pablo sat cross-legged, with his back to his mother, and slowly but audibly banged his head repeatedly against the point in the corner at which the two walls intersected. Aside from the sound of his banging head, and the sound of his mother's chewing and breathing, the room was strangely peaceful. He counted to himself as he banged his head. "Sixty four," he silently thought, and a few seconds later, "sixty seven."

On the seventy-second, the last lit bulb in the simple fixture that hung above their kitchen table sizzled out with the sound of a sighing old man. The chewing abruptly stopped, but the banging continued. Maria looked up at the dead light fixture, a sleek arrangement of black metal rods with bulbs pointed in all sorts of directions in a very modern fashion, and she swallowed her tuna sandwich, and began to weep. She rested her elbows on the table, on either side of her plate (which, incidentally, was covered in crumbs), and rested her face in her hands, and wept in a quiet, but distinct fashion. Pablo continued banging his head against the wall in the darkness for another few minutes, until he reached one hundred and then, with a complacent look on his face, sat upright, his back as straight as could be, waited for just a moment, and then stood up. He turned to face his sobbing mother, quietly walked over to where she was sitting, and picked up the messy plate from between her elbows. Her crying did not show signs of slowing down, and in fact Pablo noticed the darkened outline of his mother visibly shuddering as he placed the plate in the sink.