The house where I was born no longer exists, not that it matters, because I have no memory of having lived in it.
José Saramago, small memories: A Memoir
1.
She had fallen asleep in her chair in the kitchen. She awoke to her caramel-coloured tea turned cold, the trace of her half-eaten toast. The kitten bookmark her daughter had gifted for Mother’s Day, slipped into her Agatha Christie.
From a cardboard box in the sewing room, paperbacks she regularly pulled to read and reread.
She preferred a good mystery, but found it more comforting to already know how it ends. She reread for clarity, to understand how the story arrived.
2.
She awoke to a rustling. The creak of the door separating kitchen and covered front porch. Her husband, perhaps, returning from his work in the yard. She awoke in her armchair, with notepad and pen on her lap. The television remained on, showing a sequence of images from London, camera snaking through Roman-era drainage. The sewers.
He came in to speak to her. Half-awake, she caught only fragments. Wait. A neighbour has died. Their immediate neighbor, found in his driveway some two hours earlier, dead from a heart attack.
The funeral is most likely Thursday, with the wake Wednesday night. So she knows.
This neighbour, but six years her elder.
3.
Encourage rest, her doctor repeated. Don’t overdo. The metal chassis that rode up binary rail to ride between floors: one up, and one down. Five meditative minutes per ride. If she could make it.
4.
She awoke in her chair, crossing midnight. The news. Her husband, who’d retired three hours prior. She rose to a series of aches and stiff joints. Slow.
Tea, and blank toast. Go, lightly. Just before bed, she required food to chase mélange of late pills. Their black Labrador, too, sniffed for her share. A slip of toast. The two, making night of their rituals.
5.
She awoke in hospital whites, the pink colour of dawn. The flutter of helicopter blades displace air, high above. The sound startled her, the advent of yet another emergency. Beyond her shared window, the landing-pad, emergencies fill up the calendar like bittersweet chocolates.
Her thirty-first consecutive hospital morning, with IV tube in left arm, held by plastic-thick tape to the back of her hand, needle puncture surface to vein. Separate line to her chest. Even for the unconscious body, tubes restrict certain mobility. The body remembers pain, and how best to avoid it. She awoke in the same position she’d fallen asleep.
The nurses pad from room to room to their station.
She drifts back to sleep again, slowly. She drifts, floating. She is a clear, glass bottle with note inside, bobbing atop waves, below perspectiveless horizon in a near-endless ocean.
* * * * * *
This piece originally appeared in The New Quarterly (2014).
A ghost story of sorts.