The Eternal Loop of Life and Death by Christopher P. Mooney
The ubiquitous ammonia-piss smell hits the back of your throat the moment you are buzzed through from the world outside. There’s another, less-literal-but-no-less-tangible funk that permeates the air. If you put your tongue out to it – and I recommend that you don’t – you’ll recognise the unmistakable stench of disinfected disappointment.
*****After a while you don’t even notice the intrusive click-clanging of double doors, the ringing of phones, the banging of pans, the blaring TV, the shouting and cajoling; nor do you notice the soft flurry of clothed limbs of the residents experiencing Mellow Monday or Wake-Up Wednesday. It’s soon nothing more than background noise.
*****Today is Table-Top Tuesday. The go-getters and still-can-doers – it’s all relative, of course – dabble in sanitised Scrabble, cram into scheduled sessions of bingo, hobby-craft and join-the-dots, or try to endure perennially-popular card games. They’re passing the time the best they can until Family Friday, when they’ll be allowed out of their rooms to mingle at will, observed but unshackled, for up to three whole hours.
*****But not her.
*****Not my mother.
*****Aged beyond numbers, she sits in a moth-eaten armchair, largely oblivious of and impervious to the reduced world around her and looking more and more like a tea-stained, yellow-tissue-paper version of a desiccated skeleton. Her liver-spotted skin has the odour and texture of a deflated lilo that’s been left out in the sun long after the tourists have gone home.
*****She’s here – in her three-room unit on the ground floor, which the literature calls The Catherine Cookson Suite – because I brought her here. Call it the price of my guilty conscience. Call it the value I put on my daily freedoms. Or call it what it is: containment. I know where she is at all times and her life doesn’t colour over the edges into my life unless I let it. Once I realised and accepted there were other options, that it really didn’t have to be the way it was, everything became much clearer. A kind of Thoughtful Thursday, if you will.
*****Bottom line, this is where she lives now. And it’s where she’ll die, which hopefully she’ll do before the amount this is all costing exceeds what I expect to inherit. Why? Because no matter what my childhood was like – and, to be fair, it was definitely decent – I won’t live with a woman who no longer remembers my name or what I’m supposed to mean to her. Not in a month of Supplication Sundays.
Pushcart-Prize nominee Christopher P. Mooney (He/Him/His) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1978. At various times in his life he has been a paperboy, a trolley boy, a greengrocer, a supermarket cashier, a shelf stacker, a barman, a cinema usher, a carpet fitter’s labourer, a leaflet distributor, a foreign-language assistant and a teacher. He currently lives and writes in a rented house near London and his debut collection of short transgressive fiction, Whisky for Breakfast, is available now from Bridge House Publishing – available to purchase on Amazon.
Photo by Brian Bullock on flickr
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Well done and quite accurate. The sounds and sights of having a relative in aged care (or somewhere worse?) Years++ ago, I had an uncle in a mental asylum. Thank you for this good read.
I think the adjectives preceding the days of the week are clever, as well as the separation of the ssections with two sentences that make it clear whom you are talking about and what her life has been reduced to. I loved every minute of reading this elegant flash of a story.