Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

The house on Mundt Avenue began its life as a typical Chicago shotgun-style bungalow in the post-war building boom of the late 1940s. Constructed from common yellow brick, the rooms set in a linear fashion, like an elaborate train car, the place originally was a tidy little home for families with flower boxes under the front window and a picket fence around the postage stamp-sized yard. Today, after decades of decline and the accumulated sediment of Oswald and Matilda’s life together, the place resembles something more like a second-hand bookstore run by a religious crack dealer. Paperbacks are stuffed into every shelf, every nook, every crevice—mass market pulp potboilers from the 1970s with private detectives and slinky ladies on the covers, lurid horror novels with demonic children etched in foil, softcore porn with titles such as Sex and Single Soldier or The Isle of Lesbos—each and every one dog-eared, scrutinized from cover to cover by both husband and wife. Much of the wall space is adorned with Matilda’s kitschy New Age iconography—glass bubble-encased monk dolls, little Buddha bobble-heads, dream catchers, and all manner of prayer cards received over the decades, archived in dusty displays and haphazard matrices. The rooms all need a good cleaning, and the furnishings are all in the style of early college dorm. But there’s also a civilized quality to the place, a certain coziness—in the way the coffeemaker has two cups next to it turned upside down on a towel, or the way the bedroom closet has two pairs of slippers on the threshold, or the way in which the bathroom is equipped with a little portable radio, ashtray, and bong next to the commode so a person can evacuate their bowels in tranquil, stoned peace.

“Matilda, honey?” Oswald creeps into the bedroom where the woman lies like a rag doll in the high-tech gurney-bed. Her spindly bare feet poke tragically out of the bottom of the linens. Oswald feels as though there’s a fist ramming down his throat, and he swallows it. “You want me to get another dose of the happy juice?”

He can’t tell if she’s even conscious. Her eyelids are as translucent and thin as moth wings. The hospice people gave Oswald lessons on how to administer the horse tranquilizer that is supposed to painlessly usher her off to the Great Beyond. But right now, her eyelids flutter feebly. She barely gets them half open when she manages to croak, “No drugs... not yet.”

Oswald kneels by the bed as though taking communion. He puts his big head on her cold, brittle arm. He can smell cleanser masking decay like a sour corsage—the odor of dying—and he wells up. He staves off the tears as best he can. He has a feeling he needs to pay attention. “Just let me know, sweetie.” His voice sounds alien and small in his own ears. “The pain gets to be too much, we’ll go ahead and—”

“No!” She grasps the hem of his collar and squeezes with her bloodless hands, pulls him toward her. “I got something to say, need my mind to be right... one last time.”

“Okay, Matty, fine, I’m all ears. Go ahead. Lay it on me.”

“Ozzie.” Her delicate eyelids open further, revealing lucid, grave, serious eyes staring back at him. “I know what you do for a living.”

Oswald had expected this moment to come sooner or later—the old building contractor ruse can only have legs for so long before the wife starts to notice flecks of blood instead of Sakrete under the nails—but not like this. Not a person’s last words. Not in between waves of agony writ large and ugly across her once cherubic features. Oswald looks up at her and starts to formulate a response—the words sticking in the back of his throat—when he sees her shudder slightly, slamming her eyes shut and writhing for a moment. The wave crashes through her midsection and makes her twitch. Late-stage pancreatic cancer is like that—the pain comes in waves—tidal waves of agony. Her head lolls, and Oswald rises to his feet, heart thumping, road rash stinging, his blood seeping into his shoes. Matilda doesn’t notice how badly hurt he is, his bloody hair matted to the back of his skull. She’s got her own pain to deal with. Oswald considers going in the next room and grabbing the .38 Police Special nestled in a hatbox on the top shelf of the coat closet.

He imagines himself loading the weapon just outside the bedroom door—three practiced moves as his tears drip onto the blue metal of the cylinder—snap, spin, click. He imagines walking back into the room, going to her bedside, grabbing a stray pillow, putting it over her head, pressing the muzzle into the pillow’s folds and... BANG! ?

Her eyes open suddenly. She stares down at him, a desolate look, her body as still now as a sculpture. “Maybe I will go ahead and take those knock-out drops,” she decides.

Oswald rises to his feet, goes over to the dresser, and gets the pre-loaded oral dispenser, which looks like a fat fountain pen.

Hands shaking, he comes back to her, gently prods the tip between her lips, and dispenses about a hundred milligrams in liquid form. He begins to sob. He gives her another hundred, and another, a lethal amount. Her eyes tell him that she knows and she’s okay with it. His tears track down his face, tracing the contours of his chin and dripping down the front of his shirt. This is it. This is the end.

Matilda is saying something to him. Oswald can’t hear a word. Her lips are moving, but he can’t hear a thing she’s saying. He leans down and sniffs back his sorrow and listens more closely.

“How many?”

It comes out of her on a breathy wheeze, but calmly, a woman at the threshold. Oswald looks down. “I don’t know if we have to—”

“How many?!”

Oswald thinks about it. “I guess about seven... no, eight... no, wait.” His stomach clenches.