by Nancy Koven
“What kind of mother was she?” the chaplain— I don’t know who invited her here—asks.
“She’s not dead yet.”
The chaplain nods, and we look down at the bed. The chintzy, chrome-peeled frame floats at the end of a long hallway, then my tunnel vision clears and it distills into a regular hospital bed, the kind with fancy foot pedals along one side. Hospital beds are like church organs nowadays; they’re meant to be played, fiddled with.
A green tentacled figure swims among the sheets, its overflowing bulk simultaneously shriveled and diminished. It’s strange that large objects can be wrinkled; strange how small objects can grow yet wrinkle. This bedridden creature has between ten and twenty appendages, asymmetrically arranged, each one tapering over the span of several feet to culminate in a springtime flower. My favorite is the one with the daffodil. On the underside of each appendage is a row of toothless mouths, placed where the suction cups would be on an octopus.
That’s what I see. I don’t know what the chaplain sees.
As for hearing, the toothless mouths emit a variety of sounds: beeps, squeaks, gurgles, wheezes, wet clicks, all muted. Sounds tend to mute themselves in hospitals, but, for those that don’t, there are hospital staff who come and say Sshhh. If that doesn’t work, then a chaplain can be sent for. The chaplain doesn’t say Sshhh but whispers phrases of your choice with similar meaning. If you push one button, the chaplain will say Soon. If you push another, she will say Not yet.
This chaplain says: “The tide comes in, and the tide goes out.”
One of my mother’s three eyes opens upon hearing this. This is the blue eye with the cataracts in it that comes across as lavender; it’s the eye she reserves for business transactions. The eye fixates on the chaplain. I don’t know what my mother sees, but I imagine she hears: Ride the riptide across. One of the suction cups lets out a giggle.
“You need to make the decision,” comes a disembodied voice behind my head. “Do we pull life support?” I can decide which flavor of tea I’d like, which book to read, which road to take home, but this? There are many roads home, darling, my mother once said. There are many homes, she also once said.
“I’ll let you know,” I tell the voice, and my mother’s eye winks at me.
As for smell, this is what I smell. I smell my mother. I smell her seaweed hair and her calamari toes. I smell bile, blood, and a good bit of pus. I smell the bleached-over excrement of the writhing monster in the next bed. I smell vanilla and cinnamon and strong coffee and other molecules that creep in from outside. I smell fresh plastic and old plastic, see-through plastic and color-coded plastic. I smell fear, but it isn’t mine or my mother’s.
The phone rings in my left hand, which is odd given that my cell phone is silenced inside my right hip pocket. I answer, and it’s my mother, speaking through a burner phone clutched by the same appendage that’s holding a pink tulip. She’s never liked tulips, so I don’t know who planted it there, but it’s a robust, healthy-looking specimen. I suspect it’s sapping my mother’s remaining strength, using it for its own gain. Its skin is lush and dewy, while hers is brittle and dry. My mother’s a sea beast who’s been out of water too long.
“Get rid of these evil flowers and replace that bloody chaplain with a priest,” my mother says, then hangs up. She calls back moments later with, “Make sure it’s a real priest.” I can’t hear her voice inside the room, but it’s impressively loud and commanding through the phone, no hint of emphysema.
The chaplain is automatically replaced by a priest, but it’s a hologram priest, one who tells me its real body is currently presiding over a baseball game two towns over. This doesn’t make sense to me until suddenly it does. At least the hologram sports the requisite white collar and rosary beads, even though it insists on speaking in that same annoying whisper. I hold the phone up to the hologram so my mother can hear it better. It makes the sign of the cross above her bed, the fake hand hovering like a helicopter that’s invaded her airspace.
“We will go with you as far as the door,” the priest intones, raising the volume just enough to be heard over the cheering fans in the stadium. “We will pray with you as you pass through this door into your new home in the kingdom of God. Let us walk together in faith and peace, dear <insert name here>.”
I prompt the hologram with my mother’s name, but it repeats insert name here one more time before fading out. Last rites are concluded. My mother giggles again through a suction cup. The phone line goes dead.
I’m ushered out of the room and made to sit at the end of the hallway on a moist pleather chair, surrounded by strangers also sitting on moist pleather chairs. Air escapes the cushion as I shift my body weight, so I try my best to sit still. We wait for a long time, so long that the strangers become familiar. When I close my eyes, I can picture these strangers more easily than I can my mother.
“Thank you for your patronage,” says a matronly robot that parks itself in front of me. Its digitized voice is autotuned to sound ethereal. Two mechanical arms present me a package of thick polyethylene secured at the top with a zip tie. Inside is green sand. The bag is heavy/light/weightless and smells of plastic. The chaplain walks by and waves.
“The tide comes in, and the tide goes out,” she whispers before disappearing around the corner.
Nancy S. Koven (she/they) is a psychologist and professor emerita who divides her time between Maine and New Mexico, USA. Her fiction has appeared in Change Seven, Defenestration, and The Haven. In her writing, she enjoys exploring the borderlands of the body, often with speculative elements.
