Short Fiction/Free Read/Literary/General Fiction/Disturbing Themes
This very short story is available for free, and will be released in an ebook edition by Alpheratz Press in early 2010 under their free read Alpherbites banner. Coming soon!
And they say too much caring makes you numb…
After years of nursing her sick elderly father, a daughter wonders quite how she came to be where she is, and asks where she goes from here.
Excerpt:
She thought, as she smoothed out the sheet—its pale softness blanketing a landscape of hills, ridges and troughs like fresh-fallen snow—that she heard a bird call. A cuckoo. Not the first of the year, but did that really matter? That some things exist at all is more important than their timing and, in her experience, time didn’t matter that much in any case.
Still, the cuckoo spoke to her. The lilting one, two of its call mirrored, in her mind, that erratic sense of existence under which she had lived for so long. Always waiting, always balanced on the edge of a new precipice, neither resting nor relenting. One. Two. Like her footsteps throughout the day, the way she moved through the pattern of her life, dragging her sanity behind her.
Each night was marked, bruised, with the sound of his leather slipper thrown at the thin wall that parted their rooms. Even before she woke fully, blinking the sleep and the blurriness from her eyes, she would have risen, thrown on her robe and gone into him. He would be sitting on the edge of his bed, the sunken, mottled skin of his face purple as he gasped for breath, trying to pull the world down into lungs ill-equipped to take it.
The doctors couldn’t understand how he was still alive. No body should be subject to the things his fragile flesh had seen. Years of work in a paper mill, the cigarettes that got him through the war…perhaps even the things he’d done in those six years, which still woke him in the night, and stained his cheeks on Remembrance Day. He’d been left with a little less than an eighth of one lung working, the rest filling slowly with every tortured breath. She considered it one of the worst ways she could imagine to die, and its inexorable slowness was the most horrific thing.
She sniffed, rubbed the back of her hand over her nose, and turned to tidy the rest of the room. His dressing table held few artefacts of the person he had been, too subsumed with the paraphernalia of what he’d become. Two matching porcelain trinket boxes—white, with pink roses—had belonged to his late wife. Her photograph, in the wartime Fire Service uniform she had worn when they met, stood beside them. A wooden-backed hairbrush and a half-empty pot of Brylcreem spoke of the dandy he had always been, and the vanity which illness had failed to wrest from him. Besides that, everything was pills, inhalers and the neat little case for his nebuliser. The oxygen came in cylinders; large, black-painted things that conjured images of 1950s hospital wards, with heavily starched Matrons and iron bedsteads. They were heavy, too.
Recently, the cuckoo-call one, two of her footsteps through these faceless, unending days had shown a little more emphasis on the one than usual. She thought the foot might be broken, but he had dismissed her fears as hypochondria and told her, fat and clumsy as she was, she shouldn’t make such a fuss. It reminded her of how, when she turned green at the sight of him eating—sucking air in with each mouthful, food mashed between dentures and gums, the sound of his lapping, wheezing, rattling spittle tearing at her ears—or when he coughed himself sick, as he did with depressing regularity, he remarked that she must be squeamish. So she had put her outdoor boots on in the house, laced the left one up tight, and got on with it.
Coming soon from Alpheratz Press
