Unpublished short fiction

The mother went from life to fetid squalor on the day the son turned ten. A short illness was expected, punctuated by certain inescapable death. The son believed her even then the villain of her own pestilent narcissism. But then death never came, and forty years on, he sits cheerlessly by her bedside, the theater of their shared, codependent villainy, a son irrevocably diminished to a premature nightmare of extra-uterine atavism. On one day perhaps he stares into the sunken eyes of the villainous void, while on other days he participates in villainy himself, but in the end she is the mother of it. And she must even now understand and sense it, the same as he arranges it within himself, with a granite certainty guaranteed by forty years of his own indefatigable sacrifice on behalf of a mother pathologized—his vow to an invisible man in the sky to feed and care for her until her natural end. Now four decades and counting, watching the mother disintegrate bodily in her marital bed, flung over and stacked to the ceiling with the mismatched piecing of five hundred heavy quilts—and the physical and temporal weight of their presence—he has resolved to the conclusion, inevitably, that death is a manufactured fantasy construct conceived by doctors and rotting mothers to change sons to rot, as well.
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5,003 words