Sitting at my family’s cemetery plot, I was contemplating my future. It has been six months since cancer took you. We had eight years of bliss, followed by two years of sorrow and pain.
Even the weather has been painful. No rain for over a hundred days. I am on my fifth stick of lip balm. A smile crossed my lips and it hurt my cracked lips.
It all didn’t matter any longer, and it would be over soon. I wanted them to find me here to let them know I cared about you so much.
I had to take the pills soon since I only had half a bottle of water left. I thought I had cried my last tear but was about to add to that ocean. That’s when I heard an awful whining close by. My plan would have to wait while I solved the current mystery.
She was cradled up against a nearby large tombstone. As I approached, she lifted her leg as if to wave me over. She started whimpering as I got close. She was a golden lab mixed with what looked like Queensland heeler. She tried to roll over, but the pain was too much for her. She looked like she might have been hit by a car, but what surprised me is that her tail was wagging.
She reminded me of my first dog, “Pepper,” who was with me until the last day of high school. She had a habit of lying too close to the road and got hit by a passing car. I didn’t know what to do, and she died crying in my arms. Maybe that is why I became a veterinarian. I could service other animals but resisted having one of my own, as the pain of separation was just too much.
I touched her head, and she closed her eyes, placing her leg on my arm. I stroked her head and heard her blow out a sigh.
I cupped my hand and gave her the last of my water.
*.*.*
That was two years ago. Now we are the best of companions. When we visit the cemetery, she still has the habit of lifting her front leg. Maybe it’s a wave, a thank you, or just a memory of her being alone and in pain. Now it puts a smile on my face, which doesn’t hurt anymore, as the monsoons have given us more than our share of rain.
What’s peculiar is that every time we are here, it makes me think of what would have happened if she wasn’t here that day. I still wonder if she was here for me to save her, or was she sent to save me?
I decided it was best to believe she was the Angel sent to save me. She does have blonde hair like my wife’s.
Jul 16, 2023·edited Jul 16, 2023Liked by Kathy Fish
Hi, my name is Pepper, I run a golden lab. Now, this may sound peculiar but bear with me. Nothing, and I repeat nothing can leave the lab, not even your lip balm in its golden casing. Why is that? Humour me, sit down and listen. It was on a dark Sunday morning. Rain was coming down hard on the cemetery at Pere Lachaise when I saw him. Jimmy. He was standing there next to his grave, head hung low. I dared not move, my breath froze in the air and then he saw me. We looked right at each other, tethered together through space and time. He looked lost and I raised my hand as if to wave and the next moment he stood by my side, touched my hand, my ring, a ring not unlike the one he wore, and with that was gone, absorbed by this trinket made of gold. Always gold. For reasons, I do not know, it binds them, holds them, chains them to this mortal plane. That was the day I caught my first celebrity ghost. That was the day the golden lab was born. Here I keep them until the end of time.
Isn’t it peculiar that it always rains at funerals? Jen thought remembering the downpour at her mother’s burial just a year ago. She nervously applied another coat of lip balm to her chapped lips while standing with friends and family under the canopy of black cemetery-issued umbrellas. Beside her sat Dad’s golden lab, his loyal companion, whimpering as the Rabbi prayed over the pine box. At the close of the final prayer, the coffin was lowered into the ground, and as mourners dropped shovels of dirt onto the wooden casket, Wheatley howled, moving closer and closer to the edge of the 6-foot deep hole. Jen grabbed for his collar, but the dog tugged, the soggy ground gave way, and they both slipped deep into the muddy grave. Everyone screamed. Screamed while one brave soul hauled them out to safe ground and handed Jen a handkerchief. Covered in mud, she wiped her face with a familiar scented cloth. She held it to her nose inhaling the peppery aroma of the “Big Red” gum Dad always kept in his pocket. When she looked up to thank her savior, he was gone. Gone, just like the rain that turned into sunshine.
Jul 27, 2023·edited Jul 27, 2023Liked by Kathy Fish
Lip Balm
When it rained—it was always raining—her lip balm tasted like pepper. The chemical bonds creating the flavor were peculiar, but even stranger was how memories of Broome Street came back to her. Broome Street. Not the up-scale commercial street it has become, with its five-dollar lattes and street light flower planters. It was instead, the sooty, industrial Broome Street of her past, when the black pepper factory still operated on the corner of Broome and Addison. These days, she imagined herself as a different person, and had changed her name to underscore the shift in her identity, but in those days, she was Carrie.
She first saw Jason walking his golden lab. He was tall and blond, with a dancer’s physique and eyes that were as flat and brown as two copper pennies. They looked into her in a way she had never felt before. True to his word, he called her that first time when he said he would. She’d not been in the city for very long, and Jason was her first friend. The gravitic pull between them was miraculous. He joked that she was Epoxy A, and he was Epoxy B.
One year later, they were married. Every day with him was another stitch in a warm wrap that enveloped her entirely and gave her world its vibrant hue. They were going to have everything.
How cruel then, that it would unravel so fast, and fate would take him so young. Now ten years later, she stood in Hollyoke Cemetery in the rain, over the stone that bore his name, the taste of pepper on her lips.
They say our memories are a recollection of our previous memories. So, no one can remember what happened with all the small details. Not true at all, when it is you. The color of your hair, scent of your lip balm. Oh yes! everytime we kissed, I could not help but let my mind slip about the peculiar taste and aroma.
Dear Pepper! it has been 20 days since you left me stranded alone with 8 billion people. I wonder if we you could see me from the sky. All that is left now is the 'Golden lab' you left me. I was never a fan of dogs, I am infact scared of them. He follows me everywhere. Everything has changed now Pepper. That is the last thing I could do for you. I am contemplating between you and him nowadays.
Seeing your name on the cemetery just eats me alive. All those days we used to sing and dance in rain like a clueless kids. Rain now haunts me, I want to stop being so obsessed with living. I finally confronted my fear, 'One life **ck it' has always been my moto.
I took the courage and went near a railway track. I placed my head on it. I could see the train approaching me. This should be the last sound I should hear, I told myself. As I closed my eyes, I heard a different sound, it was him standing 5 yards before him on the track, cluelessly pleading the train to stop.
I took a leap of faith, I grabbed him, kissed him, cried and moved out. I never thought about dying thereafter. After all its, 'One life **ck it'.
My father is investigating aquamation because my mother is near the end. Or so it seemed last Friday when the nursing home phoned me because my father wasn’t answering his phone. “It is time to come to her bedside,” said the Congolese nurse-aid, “The doctor is on his way.”
I brushed my hair and grabbed my knitting. On the road to the nursing home, I resisted the urge to hoot at slow traffic, trying to slow my pulse. For months I have avoided visiting my mother. For months I have not known how to stop the bile that rises when I think about her in a sodden nappy, crying because she can’t pull herself up out of her chair.
Dad tells me that AVBOB does aquamation. He says, “But you work for them, so you probably know all this already.” Technically, I work for the advertising agency that works for AVBOB, the mutual assurance company that also provides everything you might need for a funeral. Beyond coffins, caskets and tombstones they also sponsor the largest poetry competition in the country and I’m the lead copywriter for that.
“Aquamation is an earth friendly process because it’s greener,” says Dad. It’s odd that my father is thinking now about the earth. He turns 81 next week. He worked for an oil company in the 1970s. On the wrong side of the lead-free petrol debate. It’s not something we discuss now, however.
“A gentle, supportive process that uses the serene element of water, rather than fire.” My father squints at the website on his phone screen through a large magnifying glass. Mom had grown up in a desert town where they collected rain water in asbestos tanks. She bought herself a wetsuit to swim through the winter at Muizenberg. Near the end, Dad helped her into the pool at the gym every week, dressing her and towelling her down afterwards in the disabled change room. Some of my earliest memories are of entering the waves, held in her arms at Durban beach. Her thrill was my thrill. She taught me to swim.
Three years ago, my mother began adding pepper to the milk which made it taste peculiar. My father still brought her to the final dress rehearsals at the city hall when I played in the symphony orchestra. She’d haul herself off to the toilet in the middle of the slow movement, disrupting all the other pensioners in the row. On her return she’d rustle through the papers in her bag, looking for sweets. Finding none, she ate her lip balm instead.
“A carbon footprint that is just a tenth of that of flame cremation…” continues Dad. I’m thinking about the doctor who checked out my mother with cold hands that made her shout a woeful, “No, no, no, no, no!”. The doctor was sweet and doleful with the floppy affability of a golden lab. He confirmed that we wanted only the appropriate palliative care for Mom.
“Yes,” we agreed.
“No hospital admission?”
“No, no, no, no. no.”
When the angels come knocking don’t call the ambulance.
Two years ago Mom still recognised me and remembered my name. At the nursing home today Sr. Ruth asks if I’ve flown in from overseas to see my mother. My sisters come now and again from Melbourne, Manchester and Geneva. I blush and stammer: “I came from Grassy Park… Dad lives with me.” Her mouth opens. She seems about to say something. Her mouth closes. I say, “I can’t explain myself to myself…” She nods.
My mother wears a dark green tracksuit I don’t recognise. It seems they share clothes in the dementia unit. Her jaw hangs open, down to one side. When she coughs the phlegm gathers on her tongue. She can’t swallow. Her tongue no longer works. I shudder uncontrollably. Soon I am heaving. Unable to stop myself. Hoping I will not get sick. I’ve seen the closest lavatory. It is not disgusting. It is as clean as a low-budget institution that tends the infirm and the demented can make it, but I must hold myself together. There are worse places than the cemetery.
Jul 16, 2023·edited Jul 16, 2023Liked by Kathy Fish
Granted, pepper is a peculiar flavor for lip balm, but peculiar is what The Golden Lab specializes in. Looking for watermelon or bubblegum flavored lip balm? Head to your local drug store. But if the taste you crave on your lips as you head out that door is less mainstream-- horseradish, mulligatawny, blue cheese, jicama, or jalapeno say-- then The Golden Lab is your ticket.
Lorenzo had not intended to go commercial with this venture. He had not intended a venture at all. But after that day in the cemetery, how could he not? You know how it goes. Some are born commercial, some achieve commercialism, and some have commercialism thrust upon them. Lorenzo was of the latter ilk. His father left home when Lorenzo was five, on a day that looked like rain. “Take your umbrella Papa!” he’d said, but his Papa had just given him a strange look, and said in a strangled voice, “You keep it son.”
For years Lorenzo considered the possibility that his father’s slim black umbrella was charmed. That under the right conditions it would unfurl his rightful legacy. Sometimes he rapped the handle cautiously on the floor. Sometimes he muttered made up spells while holding it between his hands. One time he stood in the shower, closed his eyes, opened the umbrella and clicked his heels three times. At some point in adulthood he shoved it into the back of his closet and forgot about it.
When it rained Lorenzo never used the umbrella (or any umbrella), preferring instead to let the tiny wet tongues lick his skin, lick his memories clean. He kept a goldfish in a round bowl on his coffee table, and this was enough to ward off loneliness. Until it wasn’t. Lorenzo had been watching television, or rather mindlessly flipping channels on television, when a rainy day scene appeared. And instantly, the screen was filled with people puffing open their umbrellas, looking like so many landlocked jellyfish. But it was the little boy with the yellow shirt, who ambushed Lorenzo. The boy was way off to the upper right side of the screen. And all he did was reach up and hold his father’s waiting hand. The father’s other hand held open a plain black umbrella. Lorenzo shut off the television with more emotion than he could ever remember feeling. He strode to his closet, and with some effort unearthed his unmagicked, sore point of a pointless umbrella. Then he hurled it out his open window. The next thing he heard was a dignified yelp.
Lorenzo was horrified. He’d never honked at another person in his life, let alone smacked anyone with a fast-pitched umbrella. He rushed to the window and looked down into a pair of rheumy eyes set in a wrinkled, papery face. “Lorenzo is that you?” asked the silver-haired gentleman on the pavement. And that is how Lorenzo connected with his long-gone father, and how his long-gone father connected with his long-gone umbrella all in the same instant.
Of course, his father was dying. And of course he had come back to, if not exactly make amends, to at least state his dying wishes. Lorenzo’s silver-haired father wished to die with the taste of pepper on his lips. “Son, you can do this for me,” he said. And what his wavering voice lacked in strength, it made up for in confidence. “The hot, sharp, pleasurable taste of black pepper. The spice of life that made the living worthwhile. That made the sacrifices worth it. You can do this for me can’t you son?” As he posed the question, Lorenzo’s father slipped from his vertical seated position on the couch to a supine one. Then he proceeded to cross his arms across his chest, in the manner of one practicing being dead. Lorenzo sighed. And then he got to work.
Cosmetics were his forte. It took a dozen times a dozen tries, but by morning it was ready. The balm was smooth, and a surprisingly delicate shade of cream. After experimenting with green and black peppercorns, Lorenzo had landed on the white ones. He knelt on the floor next to the sofa. His father’s breathing was growing more labored but his rheumy eyes were open and watchful. Catching sight of the balm his face brightened visibly, he grew wildly enthusiastic (albeit in the muted way of the dying.) He nodded feverishly, and Lorenzo, correctly interpreting the gesture, knelt down, and with a fastidiously clean index finger, applied the balm in even strokes on his father’s lips.
His father, feeling the familiar bite, the sensation of heat, smiled. “It’s golden son,” he said, “It’s golden.” With effort, he retrieved from his pocket a small scrap of paper, pressed it into Lorenzo’s hands, and left (his body, not the room.) Lorenzo looked at his dead father. Then he looked at the goldfish, who looked briefly back at him before swimming to the other side of the bowl. Lorenzo looked at the scrap of paper. Scrawled on it in black ink was what appeared to be a phone number. As he dialed it with fingers that moved as though underwater, as though in a trance, Lorenzo had the distinct feeling that with this sequence of digits, the spell he had been waiting for all his life, would be unleashed.
His father’s business partner Lexander answered the phone as he always did, on the thirteenth ring. Any sooner, and you couldn’t be sure the person on the other end meant business. There were no hellos. “Did you do it?” he asked. “I did,” said Lorenzo. “He knew you would,” said Lexander, his voice warming by significant degrees, “I’ll bring the paperwork to the cemetery Friday. You can begin expanding the product line Monday.”
That’s how The Golden Lab was born. A successful boutique company whose clients are all en route to the next world, each one aspiring to exit this one with a specific taste on their lips. Is it a hint of cherry soda, peppermint or fruit punch you wish to bow out on? Then you will be cordially redirected to your local drug store. The Golden Lab specializes exclusively (and it may be noted, expensively) in complex, offbeat and curious tastes. Tastes strong enough to absolve the dying, strange enough to reenchant those left behind.
Thanks Kathy, for a bit of fun before I get out of bed on this freezing morning. Here’s my 142 words 😊:
Lip balm was difficult to formulate at the best of times. Portia, with her naturally luscious lips, had the perfect recipe, but she’d taken it to her grave.
I’d considered a trip to the cemetery with Alicia, but she said even her advanced occult skills could not access a recipe from the recently departed.
So I walked in the rain to my favourite place - my golden lab. The gold was inspirational, warm. No sterile white walls, holding your spirit in.
Sanjay, the new boy, tapped at the window, confidently strode in, his richly embroidered traditional clothes right at home amongst my gold, not peculiar at all.
He walked to my bench and placed a small vial of Black Pepper essential oil in my rack.
“Ayurveda” he said and his eyes smiled a deep liquid chocolate smile. “Your friend Portia knew our remedies.”
Love your prompts, love your classes, love your wise and encouraging guidance. Thank you. I'm glad you're having such a fulfilling experience, and hope to attend that one also someday! Say hello from me to any flash friends I still have yet to meet.
Love, Traci NW
Here's my own response to today's prompt (wc: 300):
***
Cemetery Time
He had a plan. No job, home, or girlfriend now, but a plan and place to craft it.
Each heavy afternoon found him in the cemetery prone before the Oldman plot staring up the underside of oak trees. Rain was in the plan today. He planned to leave with a plan for his number of todays. The longer it took, the wetter he'd get: a morose kind of right. No crying for himself anymore. The oaks would do that for him.
He planned the sad silence, now his only good friend. But it rattled today, unplanned. It kept knocking, like the dead wanting up and out. He sat up, undead and annoyed. Across the street, movement. In a dirty window, between peeling paint, under a sagging gutter, a frail hand waved him in. He looked around then back again. Waving still. He followed, spellbound.
She sat him at her kitchen table, mentioned rain coming. How peculiar to lie down each day in that old cemetery, she said. She made her golden lab stay on his bed in the corner, but the dog's tail thumped the hope of friendship. Pepper, the great-grandkids named him when they gave her the puppy. How peculiar, she said again, shaking her grey head. She needed help with the house and the dog before her kids put her in the "old-folks home." She would make him cinnamon cookies while he made a plan, holding the cumin bottle as proof. He planned to eat them anyway.
Rain came. They waited together, making new plans. Rising to leave, renewed, they hugged and thanked each other. He'd be back tomorrow, cemetery time now hers. Passing her desk by the door, he moved the tube of lip balm away from the glue stick, to the dish with keys and lipstick.
Hi! I’m new to writing and just wanted to participate thanks! Please forgive errors 😅
New
She wasn’t used to kindness. It didn’t suit her proclivities. She liked to be alone. Lost on her own. She shut her eyes and thought of a cemetery in the rain. The old comforts of bleakness and the peculiar sense of the morbid reality of existence gave her a kind of peace. She opened her eyes and looked again to the horizon and setting sun disappearing behind the thin line of coulds heavy with rain. She thought of her brother an hour up the coast in San Francisco with his new puppy. A designer golden lab—whatever that was. Was that supposed to be the goal? To distract ourselves with the oddities available to us in any given moment? Maybe that’s what this was. The moments with the man sitting on the bench beside her. Maybe we are each others oddity. She wasn’t sure if that ment she was deciding to buy into the fantasy. These past several weeks after their meeting did feel like there was an interesting story unfolding. He held no judgment of her. He just heald space. He didn’t seem bothered by the silence between them. It was easy to rest in the their stillness together and just listen to the ocean waves rhythmically hit the rocks and sand. The light grew more and more faint and the chill of the dark began to creep up her arms. As the tide continued to rise, the crash of the waves began to pepper her face with salt spray. She was happy she realized. Strange as it was to admit. Though she couldn’t help feel a moment of hope followed by fear. She looked down at her shoes on the sandy pavement. Near her feet a discarded tube of lip balm lay at the edge of the steps leading down to the darkening beach. It was on the precipice of falling down the stairs to be buried in the sand forever. It was in that moment she knew. Whatever it was that this man and her were together and whatever this openness was, she could accept.
Title: An Angel…Just in Time
Sitting at my family’s cemetery plot, I was contemplating my future. It has been six months since cancer took you. We had eight years of bliss, followed by two years of sorrow and pain.
Even the weather has been painful. No rain for over a hundred days. I am on my fifth stick of lip balm. A smile crossed my lips and it hurt my cracked lips.
It all didn’t matter any longer, and it would be over soon. I wanted them to find me here to let them know I cared about you so much.
I had to take the pills soon since I only had half a bottle of water left. I thought I had cried my last tear but was about to add to that ocean. That’s when I heard an awful whining close by. My plan would have to wait while I solved the current mystery.
She was cradled up against a nearby large tombstone. As I approached, she lifted her leg as if to wave me over. She started whimpering as I got close. She was a golden lab mixed with what looked like Queensland heeler. She tried to roll over, but the pain was too much for her. She looked like she might have been hit by a car, but what surprised me is that her tail was wagging.
She reminded me of my first dog, “Pepper,” who was with me until the last day of high school. She had a habit of lying too close to the road and got hit by a passing car. I didn’t know what to do, and she died crying in my arms. Maybe that is why I became a veterinarian. I could service other animals but resisted having one of my own, as the pain of separation was just too much.
I touched her head, and she closed her eyes, placing her leg on my arm. I stroked her head and heard her blow out a sigh.
I cupped my hand and gave her the last of my water.
*.*.*
That was two years ago. Now we are the best of companions. When we visit the cemetery, she still has the habit of lifting her front leg. Maybe it’s a wave, a thank you, or just a memory of her being alone and in pain. Now it puts a smile on my face, which doesn’t hurt anymore, as the monsoons have given us more than our share of rain.
What’s peculiar is that every time we are here, it makes me think of what would have happened if she wasn’t here that day. I still wonder if she was here for me to save her, or was she sent to save me?
I decided it was best to believe she was the Angel sent to save me. She does have blonde hair like my wife’s.
Things happen the way they are supposed to!
Lovely. Very true. Re-stacked this. Everyone should read it. I just wrote on this topic as well:
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/writers-versus-the-world
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Hi, my name is Pepper, I run a golden lab. Now, this may sound peculiar but bear with me. Nothing, and I repeat nothing can leave the lab, not even your lip balm in its golden casing. Why is that? Humour me, sit down and listen. It was on a dark Sunday morning. Rain was coming down hard on the cemetery at Pere Lachaise when I saw him. Jimmy. He was standing there next to his grave, head hung low. I dared not move, my breath froze in the air and then he saw me. We looked right at each other, tethered together through space and time. He looked lost and I raised my hand as if to wave and the next moment he stood by my side, touched my hand, my ring, a ring not unlike the one he wore, and with that was gone, absorbed by this trinket made of gold. Always gold. For reasons, I do not know, it binds them, holds them, chains them to this mortal plane. That was the day I caught my first celebrity ghost. That was the day the golden lab was born. Here I keep them until the end of time.
---
A quick little ghost story.
The Remains of Loved Ones
Isn’t it peculiar that it always rains at funerals? Jen thought remembering the downpour at her mother’s burial just a year ago. She nervously applied another coat of lip balm to her chapped lips while standing with friends and family under the canopy of black cemetery-issued umbrellas. Beside her sat Dad’s golden lab, his loyal companion, whimpering as the Rabbi prayed over the pine box. At the close of the final prayer, the coffin was lowered into the ground, and as mourners dropped shovels of dirt onto the wooden casket, Wheatley howled, moving closer and closer to the edge of the 6-foot deep hole. Jen grabbed for his collar, but the dog tugged, the soggy ground gave way, and they both slipped deep into the muddy grave. Everyone screamed. Screamed while one brave soul hauled them out to safe ground and handed Jen a handkerchief. Covered in mud, she wiped her face with a familiar scented cloth. She held it to her nose inhaling the peppery aroma of the “Big Red” gum Dad always kept in his pocket. When she looked up to thank her savior, he was gone. Gone, just like the rain that turned into sunshine.
Loved this prompt Had fun writing this flash.
Lip Balm
When it rained—it was always raining—her lip balm tasted like pepper. The chemical bonds creating the flavor were peculiar, but even stranger was how memories of Broome Street came back to her. Broome Street. Not the up-scale commercial street it has become, with its five-dollar lattes and street light flower planters. It was instead, the sooty, industrial Broome Street of her past, when the black pepper factory still operated on the corner of Broome and Addison. These days, she imagined herself as a different person, and had changed her name to underscore the shift in her identity, but in those days, she was Carrie.
She first saw Jason walking his golden lab. He was tall and blond, with a dancer’s physique and eyes that were as flat and brown as two copper pennies. They looked into her in a way she had never felt before. True to his word, he called her that first time when he said he would. She’d not been in the city for very long, and Jason was her first friend. The gravitic pull between them was miraculous. He joked that she was Epoxy A, and he was Epoxy B.
One year later, they were married. Every day with him was another stitch in a warm wrap that enveloped her entirely and gave her world its vibrant hue. They were going to have everything.
How cruel then, that it would unravel so fast, and fate would take him so young. Now ten years later, she stood in Hollyoke Cemetery in the rain, over the stone that bore his name, the taste of pepper on her lips.
Title: Always and forever!
They say our memories are a recollection of our previous memories. So, no one can remember what happened with all the small details. Not true at all, when it is you. The color of your hair, scent of your lip balm. Oh yes! everytime we kissed, I could not help but let my mind slip about the peculiar taste and aroma.
Dear Pepper! it has been 20 days since you left me stranded alone with 8 billion people. I wonder if we you could see me from the sky. All that is left now is the 'Golden lab' you left me. I was never a fan of dogs, I am infact scared of them. He follows me everywhere. Everything has changed now Pepper. That is the last thing I could do for you. I am contemplating between you and him nowadays.
Seeing your name on the cemetery just eats me alive. All those days we used to sing and dance in rain like a clueless kids. Rain now haunts me, I want to stop being so obsessed with living. I finally confronted my fear, 'One life **ck it' has always been my moto.
I took the courage and went near a railway track. I placed my head on it. I could see the train approaching me. This should be the last sound I should hear, I told myself. As I closed my eyes, I heard a different sound, it was him standing 5 yards before him on the track, cluelessly pleading the train to stop.
I took a leap of faith, I grabbed him, kissed him, cried and moved out. I never thought about dying thereafter. After all its, 'One life **ck it'.
Etude on dying
My father is investigating aquamation because my mother is near the end. Or so it seemed last Friday when the nursing home phoned me because my father wasn’t answering his phone. “It is time to come to her bedside,” said the Congolese nurse-aid, “The doctor is on his way.”
I brushed my hair and grabbed my knitting. On the road to the nursing home, I resisted the urge to hoot at slow traffic, trying to slow my pulse. For months I have avoided visiting my mother. For months I have not known how to stop the bile that rises when I think about her in a sodden nappy, crying because she can’t pull herself up out of her chair.
Dad tells me that AVBOB does aquamation. He says, “But you work for them, so you probably know all this already.” Technically, I work for the advertising agency that works for AVBOB, the mutual assurance company that also provides everything you might need for a funeral. Beyond coffins, caskets and tombstones they also sponsor the largest poetry competition in the country and I’m the lead copywriter for that.
“Aquamation is an earth friendly process because it’s greener,” says Dad. It’s odd that my father is thinking now about the earth. He turns 81 next week. He worked for an oil company in the 1970s. On the wrong side of the lead-free petrol debate. It’s not something we discuss now, however.
“A gentle, supportive process that uses the serene element of water, rather than fire.” My father squints at the website on his phone screen through a large magnifying glass. Mom had grown up in a desert town where they collected rain water in asbestos tanks. She bought herself a wetsuit to swim through the winter at Muizenberg. Near the end, Dad helped her into the pool at the gym every week, dressing her and towelling her down afterwards in the disabled change room. Some of my earliest memories are of entering the waves, held in her arms at Durban beach. Her thrill was my thrill. She taught me to swim.
Three years ago, my mother began adding pepper to the milk which made it taste peculiar. My father still brought her to the final dress rehearsals at the city hall when I played in the symphony orchestra. She’d haul herself off to the toilet in the middle of the slow movement, disrupting all the other pensioners in the row. On her return she’d rustle through the papers in her bag, looking for sweets. Finding none, she ate her lip balm instead.
“A carbon footprint that is just a tenth of that of flame cremation…” continues Dad. I’m thinking about the doctor who checked out my mother with cold hands that made her shout a woeful, “No, no, no, no, no!”. The doctor was sweet and doleful with the floppy affability of a golden lab. He confirmed that we wanted only the appropriate palliative care for Mom.
“Yes,” we agreed.
“No hospital admission?”
“No, no, no, no. no.”
When the angels come knocking don’t call the ambulance.
Two years ago Mom still recognised me and remembered my name. At the nursing home today Sr. Ruth asks if I’ve flown in from overseas to see my mother. My sisters come now and again from Melbourne, Manchester and Geneva. I blush and stammer: “I came from Grassy Park… Dad lives with me.” Her mouth opens. She seems about to say something. Her mouth closes. I say, “I can’t explain myself to myself…” She nods.
My mother wears a dark green tracksuit I don’t recognise. It seems they share clothes in the dementia unit. Her jaw hangs open, down to one side. When she coughs the phlegm gathers on her tongue. She can’t swallow. Her tongue no longer works. I shudder uncontrollably. Soon I am heaving. Unable to stop myself. Hoping I will not get sick. I’ve seen the closest lavatory. It is not disgusting. It is as clean as a low-budget institution that tends the infirm and the demented can make it, but I must hold myself together. There are worse places than the cemetery.
Granted, pepper is a peculiar flavor for lip balm, but peculiar is what The Golden Lab specializes in. Looking for watermelon or bubblegum flavored lip balm? Head to your local drug store. But if the taste you crave on your lips as you head out that door is less mainstream-- horseradish, mulligatawny, blue cheese, jicama, or jalapeno say-- then The Golden Lab is your ticket.
Lorenzo had not intended to go commercial with this venture. He had not intended a venture at all. But after that day in the cemetery, how could he not? You know how it goes. Some are born commercial, some achieve commercialism, and some have commercialism thrust upon them. Lorenzo was of the latter ilk. His father left home when Lorenzo was five, on a day that looked like rain. “Take your umbrella Papa!” he’d said, but his Papa had just given him a strange look, and said in a strangled voice, “You keep it son.”
For years Lorenzo considered the possibility that his father’s slim black umbrella was charmed. That under the right conditions it would unfurl his rightful legacy. Sometimes he rapped the handle cautiously on the floor. Sometimes he muttered made up spells while holding it between his hands. One time he stood in the shower, closed his eyes, opened the umbrella and clicked his heels three times. At some point in adulthood he shoved it into the back of his closet and forgot about it.
When it rained Lorenzo never used the umbrella (or any umbrella), preferring instead to let the tiny wet tongues lick his skin, lick his memories clean. He kept a goldfish in a round bowl on his coffee table, and this was enough to ward off loneliness. Until it wasn’t. Lorenzo had been watching television, or rather mindlessly flipping channels on television, when a rainy day scene appeared. And instantly, the screen was filled with people puffing open their umbrellas, looking like so many landlocked jellyfish. But it was the little boy with the yellow shirt, who ambushed Lorenzo. The boy was way off to the upper right side of the screen. And all he did was reach up and hold his father’s waiting hand. The father’s other hand held open a plain black umbrella. Lorenzo shut off the television with more emotion than he could ever remember feeling. He strode to his closet, and with some effort unearthed his unmagicked, sore point of a pointless umbrella. Then he hurled it out his open window. The next thing he heard was a dignified yelp.
Lorenzo was horrified. He’d never honked at another person in his life, let alone smacked anyone with a fast-pitched umbrella. He rushed to the window and looked down into a pair of rheumy eyes set in a wrinkled, papery face. “Lorenzo is that you?” asked the silver-haired gentleman on the pavement. And that is how Lorenzo connected with his long-gone father, and how his long-gone father connected with his long-gone umbrella all in the same instant.
Of course, his father was dying. And of course he had come back to, if not exactly make amends, to at least state his dying wishes. Lorenzo’s silver-haired father wished to die with the taste of pepper on his lips. “Son, you can do this for me,” he said. And what his wavering voice lacked in strength, it made up for in confidence. “The hot, sharp, pleasurable taste of black pepper. The spice of life that made the living worthwhile. That made the sacrifices worth it. You can do this for me can’t you son?” As he posed the question, Lorenzo’s father slipped from his vertical seated position on the couch to a supine one. Then he proceeded to cross his arms across his chest, in the manner of one practicing being dead. Lorenzo sighed. And then he got to work.
Cosmetics were his forte. It took a dozen times a dozen tries, but by morning it was ready. The balm was smooth, and a surprisingly delicate shade of cream. After experimenting with green and black peppercorns, Lorenzo had landed on the white ones. He knelt on the floor next to the sofa. His father’s breathing was growing more labored but his rheumy eyes were open and watchful. Catching sight of the balm his face brightened visibly, he grew wildly enthusiastic (albeit in the muted way of the dying.) He nodded feverishly, and Lorenzo, correctly interpreting the gesture, knelt down, and with a fastidiously clean index finger, applied the balm in even strokes on his father’s lips.
His father, feeling the familiar bite, the sensation of heat, smiled. “It’s golden son,” he said, “It’s golden.” With effort, he retrieved from his pocket a small scrap of paper, pressed it into Lorenzo’s hands, and left (his body, not the room.) Lorenzo looked at his dead father. Then he looked at the goldfish, who looked briefly back at him before swimming to the other side of the bowl. Lorenzo looked at the scrap of paper. Scrawled on it in black ink was what appeared to be a phone number. As he dialed it with fingers that moved as though underwater, as though in a trance, Lorenzo had the distinct feeling that with this sequence of digits, the spell he had been waiting for all his life, would be unleashed.
His father’s business partner Lexander answered the phone as he always did, on the thirteenth ring. Any sooner, and you couldn’t be sure the person on the other end meant business. There were no hellos. “Did you do it?” he asked. “I did,” said Lorenzo. “He knew you would,” said Lexander, his voice warming by significant degrees, “I’ll bring the paperwork to the cemetery Friday. You can begin expanding the product line Monday.”
That’s how The Golden Lab was born. A successful boutique company whose clients are all en route to the next world, each one aspiring to exit this one with a specific taste on their lips. Is it a hint of cherry soda, peppermint or fruit punch you wish to bow out on? Then you will be cordially redirected to your local drug store. The Golden Lab specializes exclusively (and it may be noted, expensively) in complex, offbeat and curious tastes. Tastes strong enough to absolve the dying, strange enough to reenchant those left behind.
Thanks Kathy, for a bit of fun before I get out of bed on this freezing morning. Here’s my 142 words 😊:
Lip balm was difficult to formulate at the best of times. Portia, with her naturally luscious lips, had the perfect recipe, but she’d taken it to her grave.
I’d considered a trip to the cemetery with Alicia, but she said even her advanced occult skills could not access a recipe from the recently departed.
So I walked in the rain to my favourite place - my golden lab. The gold was inspirational, warm. No sterile white walls, holding your spirit in.
Sanjay, the new boy, tapped at the window, confidently strode in, his richly embroidered traditional clothes right at home amongst my gold, not peculiar at all.
He walked to my bench and placed a small vial of Black Pepper essential oil in my rack.
“Ayurveda” he said and his eyes smiled a deep liquid chocolate smile. “Your friend Portia knew our remedies.”
Hi, Kathy!
Love your prompts, love your classes, love your wise and encouraging guidance. Thank you. I'm glad you're having such a fulfilling experience, and hope to attend that one also someday! Say hello from me to any flash friends I still have yet to meet.
Love, Traci NW
Here's my own response to today's prompt (wc: 300):
***
Cemetery Time
He had a plan. No job, home, or girlfriend now, but a plan and place to craft it.
Each heavy afternoon found him in the cemetery prone before the Oldman plot staring up the underside of oak trees. Rain was in the plan today. He planned to leave with a plan for his number of todays. The longer it took, the wetter he'd get: a morose kind of right. No crying for himself anymore. The oaks would do that for him.
He planned the sad silence, now his only good friend. But it rattled today, unplanned. It kept knocking, like the dead wanting up and out. He sat up, undead and annoyed. Across the street, movement. In a dirty window, between peeling paint, under a sagging gutter, a frail hand waved him in. He looked around then back again. Waving still. He followed, spellbound.
She sat him at her kitchen table, mentioned rain coming. How peculiar to lie down each day in that old cemetery, she said. She made her golden lab stay on his bed in the corner, but the dog's tail thumped the hope of friendship. Pepper, the great-grandkids named him when they gave her the puppy. How peculiar, she said again, shaking her grey head. She needed help with the house and the dog before her kids put her in the "old-folks home." She would make him cinnamon cookies while he made a plan, holding the cumin bottle as proof. He planned to eat them anyway.
Rain came. They waited together, making new plans. Rising to leave, renewed, they hugged and thanked each other. He'd be back tomorrow, cemetery time now hers. Passing her desk by the door, he moved the tube of lip balm away from the glue stick, to the dish with keys and lipstick.
Kathy, I love the prompt words and the storyline suggestion that includes humor! I'll give it a go this weekend!
Meredyth
Hi! I’m new to writing and just wanted to participate thanks! Please forgive errors 😅
New
She wasn’t used to kindness. It didn’t suit her proclivities. She liked to be alone. Lost on her own. She shut her eyes and thought of a cemetery in the rain. The old comforts of bleakness and the peculiar sense of the morbid reality of existence gave her a kind of peace. She opened her eyes and looked again to the horizon and setting sun disappearing behind the thin line of coulds heavy with rain. She thought of her brother an hour up the coast in San Francisco with his new puppy. A designer golden lab—whatever that was. Was that supposed to be the goal? To distract ourselves with the oddities available to us in any given moment? Maybe that’s what this was. The moments with the man sitting on the bench beside her. Maybe we are each others oddity. She wasn’t sure if that ment she was deciding to buy into the fantasy. These past several weeks after their meeting did feel like there was an interesting story unfolding. He held no judgment of her. He just heald space. He didn’t seem bothered by the silence between them. It was easy to rest in the their stillness together and just listen to the ocean waves rhythmically hit the rocks and sand. The light grew more and more faint and the chill of the dark began to creep up her arms. As the tide continued to rise, the crash of the waves began to pepper her face with salt spray. She was happy she realized. Strange as it was to admit. Though she couldn’t help feel a moment of hope followed by fear. She looked down at her shoes on the sandy pavement. Near her feet a discarded tube of lip balm lay at the edge of the steps leading down to the darkening beach. It was on the precipice of falling down the stairs to be buried in the sand forever. It was in that moment she knew. Whatever it was that this man and her were together and whatever this openness was, she could accept.