The beast lies still as I enter the room. Every time, a shock to see it slouched there, head hanging low over a pendulous necklace of flesh. It has been nearly two years since that first day, two years of steady decline. Flies buzz about it as above a rotting carcass, hideous onlookers jeering, dancing a maddening tarantella. They know the beast is too weak to move them on, limbs too heavy to lift and swat. Instead, that foul mouth rasps, spits and wheezes; those dark eyes spin malevolence like circus knife-men. The flies revel in their spittle shower, and those dark eyes turn my way, showing the same frustration and hate.
Will it be today? God, please take it away.
A throat that has lost the mechanisms of voice instead pushes out a single thin line of drool and accompanying whine like a torn grass-whistle, slack and flapping between two thumbs. I know what it needs. The only reason I enter this room. It raises a finger my way, yellowed with a band of sausage pink where the ring was cut away. Jabbing the air with a mildewed claw, at once commanding and repulsive.
Three perfect tubes spring from that mass, feeding life in measured drops. I unclip an empty bag; reaching for another I send a shaft of light cutting the dusty air, and I see the shadow of my mother.
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