A teenage girl is left alone and terrified after the sudden reappearance of her abusive mother. 

Narrated by Céline Guild 

Written and Produced by Doryen Chin 

 

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"Aftermath - Madness Paranoia" "Deep Noise" "Departure - Ghostpocalypse" "Echoes of Time V2" "Inner Sanctum" "Long Note Two" "Medusa" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 

 

[content warning: parental abuse, drug abuse mention, police, hunger]

 

Transcript: 

 

Note: The audio you will hear is slightly altered from the text below, but the transcript is accurate for most purposes. 

VACANCY

written byDoryen Chin

My name is Jeanette Vaughn. I was sixteen years old when I ran away from home. Almost sixteen. They say that addiction is a disease. But living with an addict isn't just living with a sick person. You're also living with the addiction. I had been living alone with my mother for several years. I think I was maybe, seven or eight when dad left. I know. Same old story. But as mad as I am at him for leaving, I can't say that I blame him. I just kinda wish he'd taken me with him. I'd run away a few times already, before the big last one. At first it was just to like, teach my mom a lesson. If she didn't get clean, if she didn't get better, she'd lose me. It didn't work, of course. I think she knew I was full of it. Even with all the junk in her brain, she could tell I wasn't serious. Until the last time. The last time was different.

She'd just had a huge breakup. For months she was seeing this guy. All sunshine and rainbows. I even got to meet him a few times. And she never brought guys back to our place. I don't think she wanted them to know she had a kid. So whenever she was seeing a guy, she'd disappear. Sometimes for weeks. When they inevitably moved onto something better, she'd suddenly be home all the time. And we'd fight. The fights were always bad, but at least fighting was easy. When you're in a fight, you know what side you're on. It's the in-between times that are the hardest. They remind you there's a person in there. Behind the hateful face, behind the humiliation and constant belittlement. Sometimes I'd pick a fight just because I couldn't stand the silence.

But this one was bad. I was doing my homework on the kitchen table after having spent the entire day cleaning the apartment. My mom's boyfriend was supposed to be coming over for dinner and she kept talking about how this was going to be the one. I think she really thought he was gonna propose to her. So she called my school and told them I was sick so she could make me stay home and clean up for her. I had a friend from school drop off my homework. Well not a friend-friend. Just a person from school I talked to sometimes. Sorry. It was getting late and my mom hadn't showed up yet. The company shut off her phone so I couldn't call or anything. So I just waited. It got dark. Eventually I was too tired and hungry to wait so I just heated up some leftovers and went to bed. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. For all her faults, she let me have the bedroom and she slept on a foldout in the living room. That meant that when she came home in the middle of the night, I knew I'd find her there. Crashed out. But the next morning the couch was empty. It hadn't even been touched. When she wasn't home that night after school, I called the cops.

Sheena didn't have a great relationship with the cops. She had a record. When I called and told them what happened, they went through the motions. Five foot seven. Long, curly black hair that goes down to her waist. Last seen getting high with some asshole behind a Circle K. It was pretty obvious that they weren't going to do anything. People like my mom go missing all the time and in most cases they're just off somewhere getting so high they forget to come home. They told me to follow up if I heard anything and said they'd be in touch. As much