Abundant among the stars
“Are you suckin’ limes, are you?” she asked in a scolding monotone.
“What? Less of the riddles, mum.”
The mother’s eyes were committed elsewhere, following the tea’s steamy plume that sharpened her cheek’s broken veins.
“You’ve a sour puss on you, that’s why,” she barked with weak lips.
She moved a hot spoon in a gyre, before kneading the teabag against the wall of the mug with the cutlery’s rear, until it was turbid and black. If the teabag ripped, the mother would tut-tut and say Yerra silly woman, flick on the kettle and repeat the ritual. This compulsion terrorised Dee. But she will miss these familiar aggravations when it’s her time. Maybe in a cafe somewhere, a stranger will do the same teaspoon swirl, and Dee will watch in a quiet sob. And she will say, without rue or sadness, that mum’s still teasing her, even in the afterlife. A delusional homage that no one else—not even the dead—will appreciate.
“Come on, mum, not today.”
“Don’t be blackguardin’ me, you’ll find someone new,” she said in a dismissive pah. “Sure, isn’t what’s-his-name—the accountant with the hair, by the bridge—single?”
“Mum,” she retorted, “Peter was my fiancé, we had plans. And, Jesus, I’m not gonna rebound while he’s dead a few days in the next room.”
She ejected herself from the kitchen, to careen away from thoughts of her father, who died lonely, leaving a widow in a rickety boreen house wherein to die lonely, too. The countryside air can only administer so much medicine before isolation starts to chafe away at sanity. Dee appreciated that.
She knocked on the door, hoping Peter would say come in. Reaching inside the coffin to touch his chest, it felt like clay without its pulse. He could presage her worst days at work—with a breakfast in bed. Her somnambulating ears always perked at the frying pan’s sizzle and the muffle of his clumsy voice, singing some bubblegum jazz number about a woman who cooks eggplants. The brain could never shake off the melody, even during those tense conference calls, but she was bloody grateful.
I might learn that song, she cogitated while caressing his torso. It was softer now, not firm like when they made love at spontaneous moments in the night. She wondered if it would be appropriate to tell his mother it was the greatest honour to worship the body she had gifted the Earth. She also wondered if it would be appropriate to share her body with another while his spirit was abundant among the stars.
As long as we keep spinning around the sun’s coronal rim, he will be out there waiting for me, she thought while resting her head against his pallid cheeks. That disposition made her content. Fingertips swirled along his face, mirroring the motion of the teaspoon’s whirling clink in the kitchen, until she could no longer hear its chime.
“Yerra silly woman, so you are,” came mother’s hush scolding.
And Dee was bloody grateful.
ENDS
Fintan Walsh, a native of Clarina, County Limerick, is a 28-year-old journalist with the Limerick Leader and a graduate of University of Limerick. When he is not writing about the physical truths of the world around us, he spends his spare time writing about the sentimental realities within us.
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