flash by patrick eades

The Lifespan of a Window

I trace the wrinkles on her forehead with my thumb. I count them, like the rings of a tree, one for each decade.

Will you still love me when I’m old and gray? she asks.

Of course, I will darling, I tell her. 

I cut her hair short, lest the tangled white strands settle across her face like cobwebs. There are no longer any mirrors in our house, not since she started screaming at the strange elderly woman haunting the glass. 

She tells me I need more sleep, more vitamins, less stress. She wonders why I look so old, says I’ve really let myself go. I remember our wedding day like it was yesterday, like the fifty years that have since passed were on fast forward. I remember the dress she wore that stopped my heart and the moisture on the back of her father’s hand as he wiped his eyes furiously before the photographer could snap him. Now she can’t even remember her father’s name.

I have to use my mobile phone camera to check my work when I dye my hair, but I can’t figure out how to use the blasted zoom function. Margie was always better than me with technology. She could send emails and Facebooks while I scribbled away at letters like a twentieth-century luddite. I leave her phone on charge—just in case—and it pings throughout day, lost friends hurling telegrams into the void.

The specialist said dementia is a wide umbrella, and Margie has one of the rare types that strips the years off her, like flesh falling off the bone. Eventually she may be stranded in a single event in her mind. No past, no future, her present lost along the line.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep up appearances. I have a cupboard chock full of moisturisers and revitalizers; I hide cucumber slices under my sleep mask at night; I attend monthly Botox appointments at the beauty clinic on Gray Street. But it’s not enough to fool the reaper of time.

Sometimes, she wakes before I do, rolls over to spoon me, and recoils at the saggy skin above my elbow or the liver spots dotting my hands. 

When she stares into my eyes, it is through a window that gathers dust and grime. She ends up squinting, trying hard to recognize her lover, her friend, her companion. I scrub the glass until my knuckles bleed but to no avail, the darkness spreads like oil across an ocean. One day soon, it will lose the last of its transparency, and we will both be alone again.

I kiss the cracked skin of her lips so that her eyes may close and pray she remembers my taste a little longer.

Patrick Eades works in hospitals by day and writes by night. He lives sandwiched between the National Parks of southern Sydney with his wife and dog, and has appeared in one film, where he played a drunken boxer with a strong dislike of DJs who think they can sing. He can be found at https://patrickeades.net/