what happens when you're not a stranger

She slipped through back out the optic nerve, dragging her sledgehammer behind her, trying to hold her head up high. Looking at the shattered glass that lay in her wake, she couldn't help but feel maybe she had gone just a bit too far, an extra shot of whiskey too much, a sledgehammer to large, and one swing too many. If her feelings needed any backup, the fact that she slipped out through the tears that were streaming down his cheeks affirmed her fear. Red from the burning of the salt that came stumbling from his ducts, freckled from the years of swinging bats and pitching baseballs under the sun's rays.
She stumbled into her room, slipped off her "hooker heels." They were six inches, black, plastic, and made to dominate. The first layer revealed naked legs and thick socks which allowed her foot to fit more snug into the boot. The latex body suit was, at first, difficult to peel off. Like a wetsuit, one needs to allow oxygen to pass through the skin and the material or it will just stay suctioned to your body. She was able to pull it off after a few futile attempts. She lay it on the floor of her room which was in just as much dissarray as her mind. The sobering cries of her brother slipped through the crack under her door and jumped through the thin wall that had divided their, at one time, one room into two 15 years earlier. She despondantly put on her pajamas and slinked into bed. feeling quite guilty, but prolonging the beginning of her nights sleep with videos of opinionated women, not quite knowing just how she would feel the next day, but knowing well enough it couldn't be close to any feelings of contentment.
Have you ever done that? Regretted a moment so terribly you prolonged the next day from happening when you knew the true consequences would hit you in the face? That's the problem with the combination of terrible feelings and alcohol, they make for more nights like this than one could wish for. or not wish for. however you would like to phrase it.

While she was peeling the plastic layers from her epidermis and sinking a bit further into regret as the alcohol began to leak out her toes, the relationship between her brother and mother was taking an unusual turn. Actually, it wasn't that unusual, it seemed to be the pattern in their family. Whenever she and her brother got into unusually nasty fights, mother always came to save the day. Looking back on their history of fights, it seems that she was either the instigator or the more vicious of the two. He reacted to things most people would brush off and either throw up his middle finger and curse as he left the house, but she tended to dig her nails in. The day after her mother told her even when she was little she needed to get the last word in.