This, that and the other
Happy Birthday, bunchofgrapes! Happy Birthday to you!
AND
Happy Belated Birthday, aussierayne! Hope it was happy!
I’m on Facebook now. Mainly to play Scrabulous. I don’t know how any of it works yet…but I will learn to navigate, eventually, I hope. And, yes, that is my husband’s picture; he was trying to look awful on purpose…*sigh* don’t ask me, I’m busy being long suffering.
I REALLY need some help/advice. Any suggestions for an activity to keep 20 or more 11-15 year olds entertained for several hours during an all night lock-in? Previous activities have included a Murder Mystery and a Scavenger Hunt. Suggestions of a mini-musical have been made, but honestly, they’re starting to exhibit some pack behavior and I think a musical would contribute to that. Is there something fun that could be done that both promotes team building and demonstrates the importance of being an individual?
Last week’s lastficstanding challenge was original fic. I wanted to do so much more with this, but ran out of time. I applied the concrit given by the participants.
Burnt Offerings
“I want a cigarette.”
I stopped reading the newspaper article mid-sentence knowing she hadn’t been paying attention anyway. “Well, you can’t have one.” I eyed the baby monitor balefully. I knew he was sitting in the other room listening; I pictured him cataloguing verbal missteps, wrapping them up as toxic tidbits to feed on later like a crafty old spider.
She didn’t know any better, couldn’t understand she wasn’t free to say any damn thing she wanted. My mother was barely there any more, addicted to morphine and tripped out on Thorazine courtesy of pain and anxiety. She floated in and out, moments of lucidity becoming fewer and fewer as the cancer ravaged her body and the medications ate away at her mind.
“I want a cigarette,” she repeated, her tone somewhere between authoritatively demanding and whiningly querulous.
I flicked a gaze to the monitor and listened carefully for any movement down the hall; satisfied I was momentarily safe, I placed a finger against my lips indicating she needed to be quiet. Her eyes widened and I knew she understood. I leaned close to her, breathing in the smell of sweat and death that had not quite overpowered the essential scent of her. She still smelled like Mom. I pressed my lips against her ear, speaking low and slow. “When Dad leaves, I’ll get you a cigarette.”
Something in that registered. “Where is he going? To fuck his whore?”
I drew back, biting my lips against a smile at the vehemence of her snarl; she sounded almost like her old self. Instead, I cautioned, “He can hear everything you say.”
The whore she was referring to, a woman he had had an affair with five years previous, was no longer in the picture. Nevertheless, Mom stayed obsessed with her even though she said she had forgiven him. The idea that “his whore” would outlive her ate at her spirit every bit as much as the cancer ate at her body; the sicker she got, the more obsessed she became. No point in telling her she was worried about the wrong woman; the glimpse of my father and my mother’s “best friend” in a passionate embrace earlier in the week lingered with me, a low grade headache, a bitter taste I wasn’t able to purge.
Watching her laying there scowling, I attempted to soothe. “I think he’s got to go to the medical supply house. You’re going through the sterile supplies faster than we anticipated.”
Her frown deepened; she didn’t like to be reminded of the colostomy. She’d been bedridden since her last trip to the hospital. Her stomach had been distended before the final surgery; the tumors were growing and some of the drugs that were part of her chemo regimen had caused her stomach to balloon.
She had always said her kids were going to kill her, so when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, there was a certain ironic symmetry to it. Only it was the unborn children that got her, not the ones she had birthed. The first surgery had taken her ovaries, her appendix, and part of her intestine. Fifteen months later, no one had expected the second surgery to end the way it had with the news the cancer was too widespread. Worse (in her opinion, at least), they couldn’t put her back together again; they performed a colostomy and sent her home, bagged and bloated, to die.
They had given her a few days, a week at the most. That was in late May; it was now early August.
“Don’t let him bring that whore into my house if I die.”
I rolled my eyes at the thought of stopping my father from doing anything and the knowledge she was still saying “if” nine weeks past the predicted time of her death. On the other hand, maybe it was her doubt that she would die that was keeping her alive.
The windows rattled with the force of a door slamming and I saw him through the window, stomping to his car, obviously driven from the house in a fury by her comments. I was bitterly amused at his aggravation. He was prone to fits of anger anyway; since her illness had slipped beyond something he could control, he had become a cloud of rage encased in skin.
“Give me a cigarette.”
I watched his car back out of the driveway at an unsafe and ire induced speed. As soon as his Mercedes was out of sight, I turned to my mother and smiled. “Your wish is my command.”
I went to the oxygen, making sure it was in the “off” position; she only needed it sporadically but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to send us both out in a fireball. I wheeled the machine out into the hall for good measure. The Hospice nurse had shown me what to unhook and how to move it.
After opening the window, I went to my purse and got the pack of cigarettes I had squirreled away. I retrieved the heavy crystal ashtray I had hidden in the guest bathroom and put it beside her on the bed. The match strike had me breathing in the brief sulfur fume; the stick blazed and the flicker reflected in her eyes. Touching the flame to the tip of the cigarette, I inhaled and it caught, pulling the smoke into my lungs. Eagerly, excited in an almost childlike intensity, she reached for it and I carefully placed the filter between her lips. “Oh, god,” she moaned as she took the first puff. “Thank you.”
Swallowing against the lump in my throat, I tried to smile at her. It was probably the most heartfelt and sincere tone I’d ever heard her use. “You’re welcome, Mom.”
She exhaled a plume of pale grey smoke, caressing it with her mouth and lips as she released it. Almost immediately, she took another drag and her eyes met mine. She inclined her head and I could see her in there, fully present, fully aware, right there in that moment. “Do you know what the hardest part of all of this is?”
Moving the ashtray closer for easier access, I shook my head.
She flicked the ash and brought the butt back to her lips. “Not being able to talk to my mother.” A deep, deep inhale; I wondered how she still had that much breath capacity. “It’s hard to fight when I miss her so much,” she added on the exhale.
Using the fleshy edge of my palm, I wiped at the tears that were trickling out of her eyes, rolling into her hair. “Maybe…” I pushed against my own eyes, anointing my hand with our mingled tears and sucked in a shaking breath. “Maybe you should stop fighting; maybe you should let go.”
Her eyes clenched tightly and her body convulsed with a sob but she still held the cigarette in the V of her fingers. “I don’t know how. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she cried. “Nobody ever told me how to do it.”
“I don’t think you do anything.” I sat beside her on the bed, moving the ashtray to my lap. “I think you just let it happen.”
She puffed on the cigarette on a hiccupping snuffle. “Do you ever pray any more?”
Surprised at such a radical change in subject, I wondered at the leaps of her mind at this point. “I pray all the time,” I nodded. “I pray in the morning and at night and every free minute in between.”
Her eyes were full of pain and fear; she looked more than sick, she looked exhausted. “Do you ever pray for me?”
I smoothed more tears from her face and offered her the ashtray. “I pray for your peace most of all.”
“Good.” She stubbed what remained of the cigarette out. “We’ve got to be good to God.” She watched the last curl of smoke as the ember end extinguished against the glass. “We’ve got to be good to God.”