'Mама, when's Luca coming home?' Emma asked, resting her hand gently on her mother's forearm.

'Emmie, your guess is as good as mine,' her mum whispered, looking away. Emma could see the tears from the side of her face. 16:56, the latest Luca had been home from school.

They were sitting on the couch, facing the window. The dust from the plaster peeling off the walls floated around their heads like a miserable mist.

Emma got up, slowly. She went over to the kitchen. It was small, like all the other rooms in her house. A square room with a U-shaped mantlepiece against the wall. Dishes cluttered every inch of it, as her mum had had this sense of apathy ever since her dad left. Presently, their house was dirty and unkempt, the little belongings they had scattered in random areas, not where they were meant to be.

Sighing, she opened the cupboard to make her mum a cup of tea. A cup of Turkish tea, yes, that would definitely make her feel better.

As she started clearing the stuff away to look for the box of tea, she found her thoughts wandering to the way things had been. She could barely remember. Her dad, had he had brown hair-- or was that black? She thought she could almost see the way he smiled-- 

Nope, it was gone again.

She extracted the teapot from under the huge stack of pots and pans, sending a few of them crashing to the floor. 'Oh блять!' she exclaimed, then slapped her hand across her mouth, remembering what her mother had told her about those kind of words.

Emma frantically began pitting back all the silverware-- quickly so that her mum didn't suspect anything-- only to hear her calling from the living room-- 'Emma, what was that? Don't tell me broke anything.'

Emma sighed. 'Нет, мама, I only, um, dropped a few pots,' she said, picking a few of them up. She quickly stacked them on the counter again and turned to the teapot.

After the tea was made, she brought it over to the living room. 

It was empty.

She searched around the house, in all the rooms, but her mum was nowhere. Nowhere Emma could get to.

'Mама?' she called. 

No answer.