When Housewives Had No Choice

The lounge bore the headiness of stale perfume.

Wyvern knew she should not be there: with the frazzled filament in the bulb, it was too dark even to think. In a slight temper, she vigorously switched up and down the off-on china tab set into the boss of brass on the wall. Calming herself, she viewed the grain of late dusk through the low denier veil she had been wearing for days.

Her elderly mother still inhabited this room, despite absence in death. Not that Wyvern believed in ghosts for real, only the shed skin, as it were, of atomised existence that sat stock still in the deceased’s once favourite wing armchair by the ever darkening window. The glinting cat’s eyes of a car crawling in reverse up the drive opposite made her think twice as to whether her mother’s spectacle lenses were indeed floaters in the air above the lacy antimacassar. The third time, she was convinced...

“Mother, I know I was a bitch,” she thought. “It’s just that I can never forgive you for telling me that life outside this house was as dangerous as the telly made me think it was.” Her mother’s voice sounded inside Wyvern’s head, the grey mulch of her brain forming a gristly mouth with tiny tumorous tongue.

The culprit television crouched in the chimney corner beneath the leaning of the bulbless standard-lamp with its own vaguely luminous screen seemingly sucking light from the darkness.

“You could have gone out. I never stopped you.” Wyvern’s voice cut the lounge’s silence into two.

She left the room, wondering whether tomorrow she would be able to restart the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. Its ponderous tick once punctuated the unshared thoughts of mother and daughter; but it was never necessary since the video recorder under the television ever showed duration in its green-eyed digits fixed for a minute at a time ... even when its on button was off. Wyvern had to unplug it when her mother died because only then the numbers ceased to shine out from the plastic fascia.

In the dining-room, where she now spent most of her time, Wyvern turned the knob on the gas fire, sending orange-blue plumes to soak up the previously white as bone grid of nipples. She offered her muslin-mittened hands to the rising heat, nearly splintering her teeth in the effort to suffocate her own cries of pain, the closer she managed to lean forward. The tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, almost breaking its way through the thin shellac to the brain.

It was then she heard movement approaching from the lounge, down the empty hallway.

But her mother had not been able to walk unassisted for yonks.

Wyvern almost wished she was outside in the Street, braving all the muggers, perverts, cripples and drunken drivers that there abounded. The dining-room behind her opened of its own accord, without a sound. She did dare look for herself.

The cold sucking feel of moulded glass upon the back of the neck awoke her to her fright.