Short Fiction
tatterdemalion
Tossing my ashes below the fig tree, a word came to your mind: tatterdemalion. You spoke it out loud:
“Tatterdemalion. Tatterdemalion. It is all tatterdemalion.”
You squinted your opaque green eyes into the tangle of slim trees, just as much to stop the bright light from coming in as to keep the dark waters from gushing out.
“I am tatterdemalion.”
This is how it began, staring into the face of entropy, marveling at its juxtapositional tango with routine.
It’s also how it ends.
“Tatterdemalion,” you announced. “I am tatterdemalion.”
I was always fond of my fig tree. I found its bulbous purple fruits and veiny leaves poetic, but my favorite feature was its tragic relationship with the fig wasp, who would die every time she crawled into its fruits to lay her eggs.
The tragedy, though, is that the fig needs the wasp. It requires her continued sacrifice generation after generation to continue the cycle of pollination that allows the fig tree to survive. Without the wasp’s death, the flower is not pollinated and the fruit is not created.
Much like the wasp, I died at 7:12 a.m. that morning. This is what I was thinking: the wasp, the fig tree, the neverending cycle of inevitable sacrifice and sweetness. Tatterdemalion.
You were there beside me, my one and only daughter, lost over a bitter resentment, then reunited with me just in the nick of time.
We had fought over who was permitted to be the love of your life. I didn’t like who you chose, and you thought it was none of my business. I thought I had sacrificed too much for you to brush me aside, and you thought being a mother should never have been about debt. I vowed not to attend your wedding. You vowed to not only have it anyway, but to kick me out of the private kingdom of people who got to witness your life.
I cannot tell you how many times I thought of calling you before my diagnosis. It must’ve been an entire decade of daily repentance that I never let you see. Now, lying there before you, the wasp turning to give the world her one and only precious fig, I realized I was wrong. You never owed me anything.
At 7:12 a.m., exactly a week before I died, I was sitting in my wedding dress, preparing to get married. “You look like a ghost,” I muttered to myself in the vanity mirror.
I scanned my face, examining each wrinkle with scrutiny.
All my life I had been a self-righteous woman, firmly opposed to artificial enhancements. Now I sat there in my feathery white garments, comically wrinkled underneath all the trappings of a young bride.
I wondered what I would have looked like if I’d been a little more vain and a little less philosophical, I would perhaps not look like a ghost stopping by to haunt the church. Then I thought about how I wasn’t here to showcase my beauty; I was here to declare my love. For so long, the prospect of a wedding felt frivolous for a woman on the brink of death. By now, I should have been here in a casket, not a wedding dress.
Glancing at the door, I imagined my own mother standing there, her shiny brooch perfectly positioned above her breast, her lipstick commanding all the room’s light. I thought of the little deaths she endured to protect me from complexity, mourning the wistfulness of her life.
In truth, she died the day I was born. That’s just the way it was back then. I would criticize her for it, except for my own insistence upon laying down my soul for love—euthanizing my dreams, admonishing my passion, and wondering when anyone would notice the sacrifice.
Then I saw you, finally free from the shackles I had tried to pass down—to marry for me, to love for me, to live for me—if only to repay me for a sacrifice you never needed me to make.
At 7:12 a.m. exactly seven months before I died, Dr. Ahluwalia told me I had six months left to live.
We shared a long, drawn-out moment in a room laced with silence. He was sitting across from me the way one sits in a church after confessing their sins.
Mostly, I just stared at him and his clinical blue scrubs against the muted grays, whites, beiges, and blues of the rest of the room. The curtains were drawn, but some light fought through the shades and landed on his monotone black sneakers. The rest was a sculpture of shadows and dust.
I glanced down at my purse and the little bag of figs I had brought as a snack. Oddly enough, my hunger had dissipated. It was as though my body quit after deciding I was soon to be dead anyway.
Finally, Dr. Ahluwalia sighed. “You should make the necessary arrangements, Ianthe.”
I nodded gently.
He leaned back, then cocked his head to the side. “Do you believe it’s the end?” he asked, turning his eyes toward me.
I paused momentarily, and my mother’s face flashed across my mind. It was not her withered, sweaty body as she slowly died away beside me. I saw her crouched over a bed of purple flowers in the garden, her cheeks rosy beneath the crystal blue sky. Her hands were lined with soil and her big floppy sun hat surrounded her face like a halo. That was my mother.
“No, it’s not the end,” I replied. “But it’s the end of this.” I gestured toward the window, showering in its meager rays of sunlight.
After Dr. Ahluwalia told me I could expect to die in a few months, I walked down the street to wait at the bus stop for a ride home. I was a widow with an estranged adult daughter, so I knew no one would be waiting for me.
I leaned my head against the bus stop sign and watched the rain trickle down onto the street, gathering in little puddles by the gutters.
Then I heard a voice behind me.
“Is this seat taken, ma’am?”
Without even turning around, I muttered a quick “no”. However, I could feel his eyes searing through my rain jacket. Briefly, I wondered what I should do—obviously I wasn’t going to talk to him.
I took a seat on the bench and placed my bag on my lap, trying my hardest to look in the complete opposite direction.
“Heck of a downpour,” he said.
Reluctantly, I turned to get a better look. He seemed my age, but lacked the gloom of impending death. With a lively spark in his eyes and glistening salt and pepper stubble on his face, he gave the impression of being truly and entirely alive—not in the sense that his heart was still beating, but that he was still reaching for something beyond himself.
My words stumbled into sentences. “It’s…yeah…heavy.”
He laughed, and his mouth curved into a hefty smile. “Where are you headed to?”
“Home.” My mind was blank, numb from meeting my emotional intensity quota for the day.
“Well,” he exclaimed. “That sounds relaxing. I’m Thomas, by the way.”
“Thomas.” I nodded, then reached out my hand for him to shake it. “I’m Ianthe.”
“Nice to meet you, Ianthe,” he responded, shaking my hand.
I glanced down at my purse and caught sight of the bag of figs again. I took it out and waved it awkwardly at him. “Hungry?”
He nodded. “Of course. That’s very generous of you, Ianthe. Thank you.”
I sighed, then forced myself to take in this cheerful, annoying man beside me. So, so annoying. I just wanted to see sad people with sad news, although my mind was too tired to admit it. “You know,” I said wearily. “The doctors just told me I have half a year left to live.”
It was then that I turned to face this man, making brutal eye contact I felt certain would deter him. However, much to my surprise, he stared right back, deeper into my icy gaze than I was used to. His eyes were a smoky autumn brown, outlined by thick black reading glasses. His graying hair seemed unkempt and shaggy in an oddly ordered way.
Turning to once again face the pitter-pattering rain, his face softened. “You are still alive.”
My eyebrows furrowed, my heart bubbling. “What did you say?”
“I said,” he remarked slowly, “you are still alive.”
At 7:12 a.m., exactly a month before I died, I was playing Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 9 No. 2 in E Flat Major on a public piano in the city center. The sides of the instrument were painted in thick pink brush strokes. The ivory keys were yellowed by time and tatterdemalion.
I had never played in public before that morning.
However, at the ripe young age of sixty-three, it was different. I was different. Thomas was watching nearby, nestled in the outside seating area of a boutique coffee shop, cappuccino in hand. Glancing over at him, I thought he looked like a poet or painter, like someone in love with words, colors, and beautiful ideas.
He smiled, then nodded toward the piano reassuringly.
I turned to face the keys.
Tatterdemalion. That’s what music is. It’s the line you trace between vibrations and emotions. I had known this piece all my life, right from when I first learned it at fourteen years old. Since then, the cadence of my playing had developed, from young but clumsy fingers to arthritic joints. I now needed reading glasses just to check the right notes.
Underneath my fingertips, I played the smooth keys and eased in and out of the pedal gently. At first, I worried my fingers might slip.
Then, the ability to worry at all dissolved.
A smile crept across my face. I saw myself walk out of the hospital into the rain, utterly lost in my own misery, sitting at the bus stop next to a complete stranger. I remembered us sharing a bag of figs, me being annoyed at his utter joy. I remembered the surprise.
Now here I was, older but more alive, playing this piano—which was just as arthritic as I was— like a young child hoping to impress a crowd. I could simultaneously feel the liberating sense that almost no one cared about my performance, but that the one person who did was endlessly lost in my music.
He proposed to me that day, even though I had told him dozens of times that it was pointless. I was going to die.
“Exactly,” he whispered. His eyes grew very solemn, and suddenly I felt the excruciating weight of a dread I didn’t realize I’d been avoiding.
I thought he would explain himself, but he just stared back at me for a long time. All around us, people were buzzing around tables, their voices a decentralized hum.
“If we don’t fight for life, we are already dead, Ianthe. If we don’t fight for love, we find ourselves lost.” He cleared his throat, pulling a tiny green dictionary out of the dilapidated gray bookbag he always carried around. He flicked through it until he landed on a page. He placed his index finger at the top, methodically making his way down the page until he stopped. “Tatterdemalion,” he announced.
I frowned. While his intellectual quirks usually charmed me, I found this detraction from our conversation irritating.
“Adjective,” he read. “Ragged or disreputable in appearance. Being in a decayed state or condition.”
Then he closed the little book and placed it between us. “My father taught me that word when I was a young man. He was dying too, and I, like most young people, was lost.” He sighed, then nodded wistfully. “So very, very lost.”
I pressed my lips together. “Thomas, I don’t know what this has to do with getting married, but-”
“Listen.” He reached over, taking my hand in his. “This word is the reason. You did not start dying when that doctor told you the news. You did not even start dying when you got your first wrinkle. You started this process of continued decay right from the very beginning. Ragged and disreputable in appearance is everyone, Ianthe. It is the sight of a human holding death and life with only two hands and no power to stop time.” I glanced at the book, my chest growing heavy. “You only live as long as you dare to live despite dying. If you refuse to continue living, then I’m sorry, but you have already died.”
Out of the corner of my eye, the world continued to drone on. A coffee pot hissed. Dirty dishes clinked together as a waitress set them down in the back. A young woman three tables down burst into laughter. Shoes tapped all across the floor. The door swung open and the bell above it cried out.
“Most people assume death is caused by a physical tatterdemalion,” he explained. “Because it is easier to blame something we can’t change. Really though, people die because they let their souls decay.”
“It is simple, Ianthe. I love you with a conviction that rivals the decay of our bodies, but completely prevents the decay of our souls. That is the promise I want—no, that I insist—on making to you: fighting tatterdemalion together. And when the day comes, we will not surrender our love to death. No, our love will be our last weapon.”
For a long time, I just felt my heart thumping against my ribs. My stomach seemed to implode. I could see the wasp, the fig, and the tree, bound together by an endless cycle of sacrifice. I could see my mother, melting behind her thick facade of meaning, as though it was a prerequisite of her love for me. I could feel myself wishing she had fought harder—not for me, but for herself.
Then, with a sudden release, there it was: “Let’s do it.”
At 7:12 am, exactly thirty years, three months, and six days before I died, I watched my mother die. Cause of death: tatterdemalion.
Her face was riddled with delicate beads of sweat, and her skin was like a translucent papery sheet loosely cast over her skeleton.
Years before she died, you had been born at 7:12 a.m. in the middle of summer, and your birth was long, painful, and lonely. I had gotten pregnant young, with a man I was in love with, but not married to. My mother was beyond disappointed and insisted that he propose to me. Soon after refusing her demand, he disappeared.
“After everything I’ve done for you,” she would remark, both scornfully and wistfully. “This is what I get.”
Sometimes she would use the word embarrassment. Other times it was unbearable, humiliating, or shameful. I noticed, however, that it was always to talk about how your birth impacted her, how my actions were not in line with her dreams for me.
After everything I’ve done for you. It was the one phrase that echoed through my head as I endured the agonizing pains of labor.
When your fragile little body was finally placed in my arms, I swore to do anything and everything for you. That’s what mothers do, I figured. Everything and anything, no matter the cost.
I would not be like my mother, I promised, because I would always put you first.
Yet, as my mother lay before me, so far from the domineering force she had once been, I could no longer deny that she had made the same promise to me, conflating love with sacrifice and binding me with guilt.
So at 7:12 a.m., five days before I died, I called you. It wasn’t to ask for forgiveness or to aggravate you with a show of feigned humility. I just wanted to tell you that I did it.
After all those years of being defined by my potential for motherhood, my early entry into motherhood, my ineptitude as a mother, my bondage as a mother, and most of all, my sacrifice, I had finally dared to belong completely to myself.
I didn’t expect it to feel like it did.
Liberating, wild, and authentic, yes, but I was also enmeshed even deeper into my love for you.
Fig Newtons. It was my mother’s last request. She wanted her own mother’s fig Newtons. Once I fed them to her with a paper towel and a bib, she had a sip of water and leaned back.
“Ianthe,” she said.
I squeezed her frail hand gently. “What is it?”
“I am still alive.”
“Tatterdemalion. Tatterdemalion. It is all tatterdemalion.”
You squinted your opaque green eyes into the tangle of slim trees, just as much to stop the bright light from coming in as to keep the dark waters from gushing out.
“I am tatterdemalion.”
This is how it began, staring into the face of entropy, marveling at its juxtapositional tango with routine.
It’s also how it ends.
“Tatterdemalion,” you announced. “I am tatterdemalion.”
I was always fond of my fig tree. I found its bulbous purple fruits and veiny leaves poetic, but my favorite feature was its tragic relationship with the fig wasp, who would die every time she crawled into its fruits to lay her eggs.
The tragedy, though, is that the fig needs the wasp. It requires her continued sacrifice generation after generation to continue the cycle of pollination that allows the fig tree to survive. Without the wasp’s death, the flower is not pollinated and the fruit is not created.
Much like the wasp, I died at 7:12 a.m. that morning. This is what I was thinking: the wasp, the fig tree, the neverending cycle of inevitable sacrifice and sweetness. Tatterdemalion.
You were there beside me, my one and only daughter, lost over a bitter resentment, then reunited with me just in the nick of time.
We had fought over who was permitted to be the love of your life. I didn’t like who you chose, and you thought it was none of my business. I thought I had sacrificed too much for you to brush me aside, and you thought being a mother should never have been about debt. I vowed not to attend your wedding. You vowed to not only have it anyway, but to kick me out of the private kingdom of people who got to witness your life.
I cannot tell you how many times I thought of calling you before my diagnosis. It must’ve been an entire decade of daily repentance that I never let you see. Now, lying there before you, the wasp turning to give the world her one and only precious fig, I realized I was wrong. You never owed me anything.
At 7:12 a.m., exactly a week before I died, I was sitting in my wedding dress, preparing to get married. “You look like a ghost,” I muttered to myself in the vanity mirror.
I scanned my face, examining each wrinkle with scrutiny.
All my life I had been a self-righteous woman, firmly opposed to artificial enhancements. Now I sat there in my feathery white garments, comically wrinkled underneath all the trappings of a young bride.
I wondered what I would have looked like if I’d been a little more vain and a little less philosophical, I would perhaps not look like a ghost stopping by to haunt the church. Then I thought about how I wasn’t here to showcase my beauty; I was here to declare my love. For so long, the prospect of a wedding felt frivolous for a woman on the brink of death. By now, I should have been here in a casket, not a wedding dress.
Glancing at the door, I imagined my own mother standing there, her shiny brooch perfectly positioned above her breast, her lipstick commanding all the room’s light. I thought of the little deaths she endured to protect me from complexity, mourning the wistfulness of her life.
In truth, she died the day I was born. That’s just the way it was back then. I would criticize her for it, except for my own insistence upon laying down my soul for love—euthanizing my dreams, admonishing my passion, and wondering when anyone would notice the sacrifice.
Then I saw you, finally free from the shackles I had tried to pass down—to marry for me, to love for me, to live for me—if only to repay me for a sacrifice you never needed me to make.
At 7:12 a.m. exactly seven months before I died, Dr. Ahluwalia told me I had six months left to live.
We shared a long, drawn-out moment in a room laced with silence. He was sitting across from me the way one sits in a church after confessing their sins.
Mostly, I just stared at him and his clinical blue scrubs against the muted grays, whites, beiges, and blues of the rest of the room. The curtains were drawn, but some light fought through the shades and landed on his monotone black sneakers. The rest was a sculpture of shadows and dust.
I glanced down at my purse and the little bag of figs I had brought as a snack. Oddly enough, my hunger had dissipated. It was as though my body quit after deciding I was soon to be dead anyway.
Finally, Dr. Ahluwalia sighed. “You should make the necessary arrangements, Ianthe.”
I nodded gently.
He leaned back, then cocked his head to the side. “Do you believe it’s the end?” he asked, turning his eyes toward me.
I paused momentarily, and my mother’s face flashed across my mind. It was not her withered, sweaty body as she slowly died away beside me. I saw her crouched over a bed of purple flowers in the garden, her cheeks rosy beneath the crystal blue sky. Her hands were lined with soil and her big floppy sun hat surrounded her face like a halo. That was my mother.
“No, it’s not the end,” I replied. “But it’s the end of this.” I gestured toward the window, showering in its meager rays of sunlight.
After Dr. Ahluwalia told me I could expect to die in a few months, I walked down the street to wait at the bus stop for a ride home. I was a widow with an estranged adult daughter, so I knew no one would be waiting for me.
I leaned my head against the bus stop sign and watched the rain trickle down onto the street, gathering in little puddles by the gutters.
Then I heard a voice behind me.
“Is this seat taken, ma’am?”
Without even turning around, I muttered a quick “no”. However, I could feel his eyes searing through my rain jacket. Briefly, I wondered what I should do—obviously I wasn’t going to talk to him.
I took a seat on the bench and placed my bag on my lap, trying my hardest to look in the complete opposite direction.
“Heck of a downpour,” he said.
Reluctantly, I turned to get a better look. He seemed my age, but lacked the gloom of impending death. With a lively spark in his eyes and glistening salt and pepper stubble on his face, he gave the impression of being truly and entirely alive—not in the sense that his heart was still beating, but that he was still reaching for something beyond himself.
My words stumbled into sentences. “It’s…yeah…heavy.”
He laughed, and his mouth curved into a hefty smile. “Where are you headed to?”
“Home.” My mind was blank, numb from meeting my emotional intensity quota for the day.
“Well,” he exclaimed. “That sounds relaxing. I’m Thomas, by the way.”
“Thomas.” I nodded, then reached out my hand for him to shake it. “I’m Ianthe.”
“Nice to meet you, Ianthe,” he responded, shaking my hand.
I glanced down at my purse and caught sight of the bag of figs again. I took it out and waved it awkwardly at him. “Hungry?”
He nodded. “Of course. That’s very generous of you, Ianthe. Thank you.”
I sighed, then forced myself to take in this cheerful, annoying man beside me. So, so annoying. I just wanted to see sad people with sad news, although my mind was too tired to admit it. “You know,” I said wearily. “The doctors just told me I have half a year left to live.”
It was then that I turned to face this man, making brutal eye contact I felt certain would deter him. However, much to my surprise, he stared right back, deeper into my icy gaze than I was used to. His eyes were a smoky autumn brown, outlined by thick black reading glasses. His graying hair seemed unkempt and shaggy in an oddly ordered way.
Turning to once again face the pitter-pattering rain, his face softened. “You are still alive.”
My eyebrows furrowed, my heart bubbling. “What did you say?”
“I said,” he remarked slowly, “you are still alive.”
At 7:12 a.m., exactly a month before I died, I was playing Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 9 No. 2 in E Flat Major on a public piano in the city center. The sides of the instrument were painted in thick pink brush strokes. The ivory keys were yellowed by time and tatterdemalion.
I had never played in public before that morning.
However, at the ripe young age of sixty-three, it was different. I was different. Thomas was watching nearby, nestled in the outside seating area of a boutique coffee shop, cappuccino in hand. Glancing over at him, I thought he looked like a poet or painter, like someone in love with words, colors, and beautiful ideas.
He smiled, then nodded toward the piano reassuringly.
I turned to face the keys.
Tatterdemalion. That’s what music is. It’s the line you trace between vibrations and emotions. I had known this piece all my life, right from when I first learned it at fourteen years old. Since then, the cadence of my playing had developed, from young but clumsy fingers to arthritic joints. I now needed reading glasses just to check the right notes.
Underneath my fingertips, I played the smooth keys and eased in and out of the pedal gently. At first, I worried my fingers might slip.
Then, the ability to worry at all dissolved.
A smile crept across my face. I saw myself walk out of the hospital into the rain, utterly lost in my own misery, sitting at the bus stop next to a complete stranger. I remembered us sharing a bag of figs, me being annoyed at his utter joy. I remembered the surprise.
Now here I was, older but more alive, playing this piano—which was just as arthritic as I was— like a young child hoping to impress a crowd. I could simultaneously feel the liberating sense that almost no one cared about my performance, but that the one person who did was endlessly lost in my music.
He proposed to me that day, even though I had told him dozens of times that it was pointless. I was going to die.
“Exactly,” he whispered. His eyes grew very solemn, and suddenly I felt the excruciating weight of a dread I didn’t realize I’d been avoiding.
I thought he would explain himself, but he just stared back at me for a long time. All around us, people were buzzing around tables, their voices a decentralized hum.
“If we don’t fight for life, we are already dead, Ianthe. If we don’t fight for love, we find ourselves lost.” He cleared his throat, pulling a tiny green dictionary out of the dilapidated gray bookbag he always carried around. He flicked through it until he landed on a page. He placed his index finger at the top, methodically making his way down the page until he stopped. “Tatterdemalion,” he announced.
I frowned. While his intellectual quirks usually charmed me, I found this detraction from our conversation irritating.
“Adjective,” he read. “Ragged or disreputable in appearance. Being in a decayed state or condition.”
Then he closed the little book and placed it between us. “My father taught me that word when I was a young man. He was dying too, and I, like most young people, was lost.” He sighed, then nodded wistfully. “So very, very lost.”
I pressed my lips together. “Thomas, I don’t know what this has to do with getting married, but-”
“Listen.” He reached over, taking my hand in his. “This word is the reason. You did not start dying when that doctor told you the news. You did not even start dying when you got your first wrinkle. You started this process of continued decay right from the very beginning. Ragged and disreputable in appearance is everyone, Ianthe. It is the sight of a human holding death and life with only two hands and no power to stop time.” I glanced at the book, my chest growing heavy. “You only live as long as you dare to live despite dying. If you refuse to continue living, then I’m sorry, but you have already died.”
Out of the corner of my eye, the world continued to drone on. A coffee pot hissed. Dirty dishes clinked together as a waitress set them down in the back. A young woman three tables down burst into laughter. Shoes tapped all across the floor. The door swung open and the bell above it cried out.
“Most people assume death is caused by a physical tatterdemalion,” he explained. “Because it is easier to blame something we can’t change. Really though, people die because they let their souls decay.”
“It is simple, Ianthe. I love you with a conviction that rivals the decay of our bodies, but completely prevents the decay of our souls. That is the promise I want—no, that I insist—on making to you: fighting tatterdemalion together. And when the day comes, we will not surrender our love to death. No, our love will be our last weapon.”
For a long time, I just felt my heart thumping against my ribs. My stomach seemed to implode. I could see the wasp, the fig, and the tree, bound together by an endless cycle of sacrifice. I could see my mother, melting behind her thick facade of meaning, as though it was a prerequisite of her love for me. I could feel myself wishing she had fought harder—not for me, but for herself.
Then, with a sudden release, there it was: “Let’s do it.”
At 7:12 am, exactly thirty years, three months, and six days before I died, I watched my mother die. Cause of death: tatterdemalion.
Her face was riddled with delicate beads of sweat, and her skin was like a translucent papery sheet loosely cast over her skeleton.
Years before she died, you had been born at 7:12 a.m. in the middle of summer, and your birth was long, painful, and lonely. I had gotten pregnant young, with a man I was in love with, but not married to. My mother was beyond disappointed and insisted that he propose to me. Soon after refusing her demand, he disappeared.
“After everything I’ve done for you,” she would remark, both scornfully and wistfully. “This is what I get.”
Sometimes she would use the word embarrassment. Other times it was unbearable, humiliating, or shameful. I noticed, however, that it was always to talk about how your birth impacted her, how my actions were not in line with her dreams for me.
After everything I’ve done for you. It was the one phrase that echoed through my head as I endured the agonizing pains of labor.
When your fragile little body was finally placed in my arms, I swore to do anything and everything for you. That’s what mothers do, I figured. Everything and anything, no matter the cost.
I would not be like my mother, I promised, because I would always put you first.
Yet, as my mother lay before me, so far from the domineering force she had once been, I could no longer deny that she had made the same promise to me, conflating love with sacrifice and binding me with guilt.
So at 7:12 a.m., five days before I died, I called you. It wasn’t to ask for forgiveness or to aggravate you with a show of feigned humility. I just wanted to tell you that I did it.
After all those years of being defined by my potential for motherhood, my early entry into motherhood, my ineptitude as a mother, my bondage as a mother, and most of all, my sacrifice, I had finally dared to belong completely to myself.
I didn’t expect it to feel like it did.
Liberating, wild, and authentic, yes, but I was also enmeshed even deeper into my love for you.
Fig Newtons. It was my mother’s last request. She wanted her own mother’s fig Newtons. Once I fed them to her with a paper towel and a bib, she had a sip of water and leaned back.
“Ianthe,” she said.
I squeezed her frail hand gently. “What is it?”
“I am still alive.”