Fiction: Embrace

By D. M. Clarke

The sound of metal hitting the hardwood floor rings out in your ears for longer than you can bear. Your arms loose at your side. All energy and purpose drained from you.

You look to her for comfort, as you always have. Her eyes are wet with stoic tears. You are broken. Yet she sees bravery and melancholic necessity. She places her soft, aged hands on your arms and gives you a comforting rub. A knowing but pained smile on her face says it all. You did the right thing, it’s OK, it will all be over soon.

Lost in that gaze for a moment. As you were when you took your first breath. Each wrinkle on her face represents something learned. Something she tried to teach you. It was her attempt at ensuring your wrinkles could be of a happier kind. But she could never have predicted that things would turn out like this.

Her hair, now long since gray, resplendent despite everything. Placing your own hand over hers, you feel the arthritic burls of her joints. All the signs of a life lived.

Now, embraced in your arms, her head resting on your chest—roles reversed after all these years—she seems everlasting. You know she holds to you partly to provide comfort and partly to avoid having to look out the window. You can see everything happening out there over the crown of her head, daring to witness for a moment what is being done beyond the walls of the house you grew up in. Close your eyes to it. Few could bear to witness it.

Your mind drifts to when you were small. Coming home from the playground past curfew. You knew you’d be in trouble, but you had to stay. The one that made you feel funny—different—was there. You chased and laughed all day. Then, when all the other kids were home eating supper, your day ended with the most sublime, brief, kiss. It was worth the punishment. Years later, on your wedding day, she tells you how glad she is that you broke her rules that day.

Your stomach knots as a scream from the street is quickly snuffed out. Darting back into your memories, into another reality, you recall the two weeks in your adolescence you spent laid up with the worst stomach flu of your life. The one which emaciated you and took six months to truly recover from. Each day she held you, supported you as you stumbled into the cold, white-tiled bathroom. So weak and suffering that you couldn’t take care of yourself. Brow wiped, cleaned, put to bed. The sheets changed while you were out of the room.

Years later. This time her ill. You the carer. Taking responsibility for the house, feeding pets, delivering warm drinks and tasteless toast. Toast she declared as the best she’d ever tasted.

Now there is an unwelcome knock at the front door. More of a hammering, really. Ignore it. You can’t do anything to deter them. Just wait them out. Besides, there is little time left.

You gently remove yourself from her embrace. Her face turns up to you. Each eye hooded by drooping eyelids that have opened and closed more times than you can imagine. Placing an encouraging hand upon her elbow, you lead her away from the mortifying scene in the kitchen. A scene you desperately wish to forget. Yet you know it will repeatedly play out behind your eyes for the few remaining minutes of your life.

The hammering is relentless. The door bulges and shakes, close to breaking free of its hinges.

You move into the living room, and she sits down in her favorite chair. A chair loved by years of usage and shaped to her uniquely. Not just a place to rest or read a book. It was a place for comfort and happiness. A place for memories and of news both good and bad. A place free of judgement.

You leave her for a moment and retrieve one of the photo albums from the shelf. Within lay images of moments still relevant and recent. Far removed from the person you once were, who wasted their life so recklessly. A smile spreads across your face as you take in the rich images. A smile wetted by tears.

Placing the book in her lap, you seat yourself at her feet. In between some pages rest old photographs, long since dog-eared. Faces smile up at you from the past. Faces of those fortunate to have moved on before all this.

She smiles at your most recently created memories while you try not to think back to all those preceding years. Decades of lies and avoidance. Attempting to ensure the everlasting pride she held for you remained unbroken. But of course, she knew. How could she not? She knew you since before you breathed your first air of this world. She knew what drove you and what could derail you.

There is a noise from next door. The neighbors that have lived there for as long as you can remember. But no amount of knocking will raise them from their everlasting slumber.

Other voices from outside join the chaotic chorus. Voices of neighbors down the way. Those who agreed to the conditions presented. Strange how little people care about their lives until it matters. Stranger still how little they care for others when it comes down to a choice of right or survival.

You do your best to ignore the sounds of beatings and boots on concrete. Flesh on flesh. You know she is doing the same. It’s not worth either of you acknowledging it. There’s nothing you can do. You used up all the things you needed to escape the suffering when you granted the others peace. The acrid smell still lingering in your nose.

She points out another picture of your wedding day. You looked older than you were. But the one beside you, they were as bright and as full of life as they had been on that playground as a child. Next to you, her, the one that was always there for you, growing shorter and grayer.

You find yourself looking before you even realize you are doing it. Staring into the kitchen where all three lay. Each resting with stained and punctured cushions above and below their head. One your age. The other two far younger.

You mustn’t. You mustn’t.

Of course you’d fought; argued in whispers. Both knowing there was no other way. Tears of farewell through lying smiles as you interrupted the two of them from playtime with Grandma for the last time.

Already she is cradling you against her breast, as she has done countless times before: when you broke your finger playing catch, when you lost your first job, when you told her what you’d been taking. How could she continue to give so much to such a thankless task as you?

A tear drips from her cheek onto your hair. She tells you it will all be OK in the end. Everyone is going through this, but you and her aren’t running or hiding. You are facing your problems head on and together. As you always have.

She asks if you remember the holiday on the coast when you were five? Do you remember the monster ships in the dock? How they were so gigantic and incomprehensible that they terrified you like nothing had before. Funny how things like that can scare us as children. It’s not the literal thing, but the realization that something like that can be. You understand for the first time how very little you will ever truly know. She reminds you how you both stood together and stared down the beast so it knew it could not defeat you. Even if you didn’t mean it at first, saying it enough made you believe it.

If only she could’ve always been with you.

They are kicking the door now. She holds your cheeks in her warm, wrinkled hands and one last time tells you that everything will be OK, you will not be defeated. You nod. Say it enough and you’ll believe it.

She stands up. Not one whimper from her or her old bones. You take a hold of her hand, looking one last time to the one you loved, the two you raised, and the empty pistol beside them. There is relief in knowing you will be with them soon. Perhaps not as quickly or calmly as they left, but with them, nonetheless.

Squeezing your mother’s hand tight, together you stare resolutely ahead as the front door explodes open and the sound of metal rings out.

D. M. Clarke, a British immigrant to America, lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife, dogs, cats, and the occasional exchange student.