day 32

Im cheating again!
Here's my short story. I hand it in on Monday night so any comments you have to share about it would help me immensely.
Remember please that this is fiction and although there are similarities to my life to keep the story real
not ALL of it is real... so don't going calling the police or anything!


Feeding my Father

I stare at his spoon and think, “could I really kill him?”
We sit next to our table piled with unopened mail, half filled plastic water bottles and containers of medicine. The messy kitchen encircles us. There has been no time for cleaning. In the next room my mother watches T.V.. I can hear it now, voices in the background saying things, talking to each other. I sit on the one wooden chair in the room and he slouches on his reclining wheelchair.
I raise the spoon. Lightly touch his dry frowning lips with its edge. There are several red stains around his mouth from previous attempts to feed him. He opens his mouth. I insert the spoon. He clamps down, teeth clutching the spoon like a bear trap. I pull. For a moment we fight over the spoon. I win. He gets the prize, a wad of smashed meat lasagna, noodles mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce.
If I forget to mash up the lasagna, give him an oversize portion, use a larger spoon he might choke and die.
“Mmhm” he hums.
‘He choked’ I would explain to the officer. ‘He choked on lasagna.’ Would they do an autopsy? Would they be able to ascertain that I’d given him too large a spoonful of mushy lasagna? Would they question me further? Would I begin to sweat after they’d ask me the same questions over and over? Would my mother know what I’d done when she’d look into my eyes?
“Good,” My father whispers.
“Mom made it for you”, I reply as if we are having a conversation.
“Mom?” he repeats.
“Your wife.” I say, “Dora.”
“Dora?” He spits out her name along with a few small pieces of pasta, which fly through the air. He says it as if he doesn’t know anyone by that name and the name disgusts him.
I move another spoonful to his lips.
“Have some more” a cheery fake smile stretches across my face, my body tenses.
“No.” he says adamantly and then takes it into his mouth anyway.
I’d considered overdosing him. On those first nights home, when he’d lain awake through the night and desperately tried to scale, like a rock climber, the bedside rails on his hospital bed. I couldn’t sleep because he’d been yelling, so I sat in his room and watched him by the half-light that echoed from the bathroom. He screamed out names of long-dead relatives and friends. Some of which I’d known or heard of. He screamed their names and begged them for help. My name was not among them. He kept calling and calling them, kept attempting to get his legs over the rail. No one came to his aid. ‘Oh please please pleeeease’ he whined to them but they were all dead. I watched him helplessly flail and call out, until finally as the multitude of names fizzled and the strength of his struggle dimmed he said, “Just kill me.” Did he speak to those long-dead ghosts? Was his request for them? Or was this a rare moment when he actually acknowledged my presence and made this bequest of me? It was then I began to think of ways to kill him.
But, no, overdosing would be easily discovered.
Spoon to mouth
Wait
Mouth opens
Insert spoon
Pull spoon back
Wait
Look at the dirty dishes piled in the sink.
Think of murder
He taught me how to ride a horse, not that I had been very interested. ‘Sit up straight!” he’d yelled “Eyes ahead. Can’t you think of two things at once?!’ But I couldn’t. No one can, can they? I think I heard or read somewhere that our brain only has the capacity to think of one idea at a time.
After accepting that his son would not blossom into a rider like him, he’d come to every play I’d ever been in. Celebrated each rite of passage with me. Gave me my first car, a 1984 blue Honda Civic. Loved my first boyfriend Greg as if he were his own son too. ‘I’m proud of you’ he’d always say.
What would he want me to do now? Would ‘accidently’ killing him make him proud of me again?
It is time for his drink. Here’s the trick. I insert the bottom end of the straw into the liquid. I capture some liquid in the straw by covering the top of it with my index finger. I move the straw to his lips and lightly dribble the liquid. When he opens his mouth to taste it I quickly turn the straw around and in one movement place the top of the straw inside his mouth and the bottom back into the glass at the same time. This way he drinks instead of trying to eat the straw. A little magic I’d picked up from CiCi the home health care aid.
CiCi comes every Monday and Wednesday for an hour and a half to give me a little break. She works quickly and efficiently. Changes his diaper in a flash. Gives him a rigorous but lightning speed bath, changes his shirts without snagging them on his elbows. She goes so fast my father has no time to realize what is actually happening. She treats him respectfully. She treats him like a thing, like a thing she respects.
Dad begins to cough and I immediately remove the straw from his mouth.
“OKAY?” I say a little too loudly. He continues to cough. I watch him allowing images of the near future to speed up in my head. Will he choke? Is this choking? I hadn’t even meant to. Should I call 9-1-1?
The coughing subsides.
From the den, connected to the kitchen by an entryway, I hear my mother’s question.
“Is he alright?” She asks.
“Just wrong pipe.”
Mom used to help me feed him. She isn’t strong enough to lift his 180 pound body. She isn’t focused enough to keep on top of his pill taking or his doctor visits but she used to help where she could. It tore her up when he got upset with her and tried to punch her.
“Why are you punching me?!” She’d hollered at him.
Dad hadn’t answered. He just kept trying to whap her with his outstretched arm.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing, mom.” Looking at her, my voice as gentle as I could have made it.
“But, I’m his wife.” And then she’d begun to cry.
They’d been married for 50 years. Both of them were the youngest of large families. They’d married late. My Mom 27 my dad almost 30. I think they’d been relieved to have finally met someone. I speculate that at the time, they were surprised by the love they’d found in each other.
She never would have believed that someday my father would have fourth stage Alzheimer disease and would try to hit her.
She couldn’t accept it. All I could do was stop asking her to help out. She didn’t notice, or she did notice and was grateful I’d stopped asking. Dad was no longer the man she’d known. She still loved him, loved the form and idea of him, but she couldn’t bear to admit that he was the man he’d become. He’d been her cement foundation like the one we have under our house, cracked and a little leaky but still holding the house together. She’d lived for taking care of him and me as well. She was happiest performing her role of wife and mother. Now, what did it mean to be this man’s wife? Whatever the definition she could not comprehend it. Did not want to comprehend. She did still continue to cook his food, but she never fed him.
These days, she watches television as the house room by room falls into a shambles.
I look down at the spoon again. Slowly I dig the spoon into the mound of food on the plate before me. There’s a certain sort of squishy moist sound that only wet noodles cheese and sauce can make like the sound of a bug being squashed.
I feel a little ridiculous. Would something like this even work? If it does, I imagine being convicted of “murder by forced lasagna choking.” The ‘Pasta Killer’ I’d be named or ‘The Supper Strangler’. Television stations would scramble to buy my story. Television because the plot would never support a movie, it was definite mini series material. Oprah Winfrey and Dianne Sawyer would vie over being the first to interview me in my jail cell.
I raise the spoon. It is heavy.
Half the lasagna left in the dish now ladens the spoon. Chunks of it lean over the spoon’s rim like ballet dancer’s contorted backs.
I watch my hand and the spoon as I guide it toward my father’s mouth. It rests there for a moment. My father’s eyes stare at me blankly. His lips begin to part. He opens his mouth. I try to gently insert the whole thing, the amount of food too big for the size of the o my father makes with his lips. I can’t believe what I am trying to do and I start to take the spoon away. The words ‘sorry dad’ begin to form on my own lips when Dad’s head shoots forward, lips stretching wider than ever. His teeth slam together like a vice gone crazy. He holds onto the food and the spoon with such strength I am unable to remove it. His cheeks bulge, swollen with the mass inside. He breathes through his nostrils, which flare up and down like an angry dog’s. I feel the wind of his breath on my hand.
I think, ‘he knows. He must know what I am trying to do.’ ‘He wants to choke.’ ‘He wants to die.’
The memory of his pleeeease and his request for death comes to my mind along with the desperate struggle of his attempt to escape from his bed, from our house, from what his life has become. I am thinking of this and wondering what I should do at the same time.
“Can’t you think of two things at once?” and it seems that I can.
Then, as if nothing has occurred his jaw relaxes. The spoon lazily falls from his hold. Slides down his shirt leaving a red trail like blood. He begins to chew, slowly at first. Overstuffed mush balls of lasagna fall from his mouth. Then he chews more quickly.
I can’t breath. I watch and can’t breath. I am the one choking. I am the one suffocating.
“Mhmm.” Says dad when he has enough room in his orifice to make sound. He swallows hard. Opens his mouth again for more.
I can’t move my hand. I look around me at the mess, the stacks of mail at anything but his open mouth and I see my mother standing in the entryway behind him. She is quietly standing there. How long has she stood there? She stares at me with a strange look on her face.
“What’s?” she asks, just that one word.
“Nothing.” I say, maybe too quickly. “He likes your lasagna.”
“Oh.” She says but doesn’t move.
A silence covers us, her and I. My father begins speaking now. Whispering unintelligent words, meaningless phrases.
“What?” She says again but to him this time, not to me.
“He’s hungry.” I say. “He wants more.”
“Lasagna?” She looks from him to me than back to him again.
“Yes.” My father says.
My mom moves to his side. She reaches out her hand to the plate of lasagna now just an incoherent glob of leftover food. She takes up the spoon, which had fallen to his lap. Grabbing a paper napkin, which she finds with ease among the stuff of the table, she wipes the spoon’s handle, dips it into the food, picks up a dainty morsel of the meal and rests the spoon against his lips. He looks up at her, straight at her, and he smiles. Opening his mouth he lightly, delicately takes the food, using his lips this time instead of his teeth. My mother removes the spoon. He continues to smile even as he chews. He continues to smile and to look into her eyes.
“I’ll make it next week.” She tells him, “If you like it so much.”
I watch her feed him. I no longer think about his death but I do think about myself. What I had almost done. My father has changed. He’s become a different man. It was not his choice but it happened.
I stand up and move aside. Slowly, while my mother concentrates on feeding my father the remaining lasagna, she edges her way into the chair I have left empty. I watch them for a moment. I grab a stack of mail and begin to sort it.