The Modern Prometrium

A short story about The Change.

You’ve not known tiredness like it. Sure, there was the time Alice had croup — back in ’94, was it? — but that was when life felt like something to be dominated. Challenged. Wrestled back in its cage for precious order… and you were ever so good at it. So good that when Nanna Eileen had her fall, the first one at least, you’d shrugged off the baby-tired and took to your new shape as mother, do-er, giver, other like a duck to water. You’d even laughed that the hours you used to spend sleeping felt wasteful.

It was all go from there. Hospital and paperwork and navigating ‘what makes a residential home the right one?’ — even though Nanna would have rather gone for a long walk off a short cliff than suffer one of those places. “I’m not an old fogey, Janine”, she’d said, chewing the syllables through thin lips. “I’ll be damned if you start treating me like one.”

In the end it didn’t matter. She’d slipped again, all within a week of setting foot back home. Part of you always wondered if it was on purpose, a movie-starlet’s faint at the top of the stairs – but in the grand scheme of things, that didn’t matter either. There were no more trips to the hospital. Instead, they bloated into long, labored nights spent consoling the girls about the finality of death, nodding sagely as they hiccuped about her not…