The Time In Between

I look at her, with her bruised bag-eyes and flower-stalk neck, and I wonder at what point she became me. At what point I became her.
And then I put on my other eyes, and I look at her again. I look at her, with her bloated, fluid-retaining abdomen. I look at her, with her slack, flopping skin. I look at her, chipmunk cheeks bulging with poison, and there is a Voice. A Voice which sounds like metal scraping metal; like the strangled cry of a trapped, mangled animal. And The Voice says:
‘Fat.’

I look hard into the eyes of a person I recognise less and less each day. Blood vessels worm their way across the whites of her eyes like tiny red maggots. Her head hangs off-centre, neck muscles too wasted to hold it straight: puppet-strings too spindly to animate their marionette.

Mummy needs me like I need Mummy. Mummy needs to be needed.

When I press a thumb down hard onto the left ankle, the white circle it leaves remains illuminated for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, my heart too lazy to pump the blood back to it with any great haste.

Colchester Road,
Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW
Distributed in Australia and New Zealand
by Allen & Unwin

Colchester Road,
Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW