Thursday's Three Word Wednesday

The words over at Three Word Wednesday are hassle, inject and wealth. I'm late. I'm in the middle of a huge writing project at work.

Metamorphosis
I’m looking at the injection point with the assistance of my little sister’s Snow White brush-and-mirror set, the silly pink plastic full of green flecks of glitter, and all I can think is that the skin around the site looks quite infected.
“Quit picking at it.”
“I wasn’t picking, I’m observing.”
“Whatever.”
My twin sister grips her hips, ample as they are – what my mother calls real grandbaby-producing hips – and sneers.
“Picking at it will only cause it to get infected and mother will be pissed.”
She’s a wealth of information, that one.
“I’m not even touching it.”
She’s hassling me, since it’s her ass if anything goes wrong. Mother says so, every time she passes by the basement steps, those familiar creaks as she passes overhead, the wood under the imported Italian tile sighing, each moan transferred from the floor to cobweb-covered joists to our ears.
We’ve been playing gin rummy, but I quit because she cheats.
It’s nearly time, anyway.
I rub my wrists with my fingers, but find that the French manicure gets in the way and I end up jabbing the chafed flesh. It’s pinkish and raw, since that’s where the restraints go.
I’ve stopped fighting it, on father’s insistence, but mother will still slap the padded leather cuffs on anyway.
His voice is high-pitched and warbled as he calls down to my sister and asks is everything’s OK.
“He’s picking at his neck.”
“Am not.”
I flip curly locks of auburn hair out of my eyes and stick my tongue out of my full, pouty lips.
“Don’t make me come down there.”
Fat fucking chance of that. Father has quite the fear of the basement, mother’s little dungeon of horrors.
“Come on down, big man, I dare you.”
I wonder where that came from, maybe the last little pop of testosterone left in my ever-shriveling nut sack.
My twin glares.
I tilt my head and stare.
“You’re just making it harder on yourself.”
I give her the finger, one delicate, China-plate-white finger in salute. My nails look fabulous, I think.
And catch myself.
And take that finger and rub the spot where mother will soon have an IV needle jammed. Flooding my body with estrogen and progesterone.
She’s creating an all-female army, she is. She’s crazy.
Positively bonkers for grandbabies.
“I’m coming down there,” mother says, settling things with twin thumps as her heels hit the staircase landing. “Enough with all this sass.”
I shut my eyes and wonder if she gets where all those grandbabies will supposedly come from.