New Normal

I ate dinner slowly that night, chewed with a mechanical thoughtlessness, stared out into nothingness with dry bark grinding between my teeth. The table was silent. Dad, his brow furrowed in concentration, flicked through his phone for something diverting. Ann sat pensively, her dark hair hanging in a curtain almost touching her chicken and mashed potatoes. The fork lowered, then raised, and another bite of the gristly flavorless flesh disappeared between my teeth.

A small glint winked back at me. All I could allow myself to remember was the glint of gold.

I felt my mouth go dry, the tasteless poultry sticking to the roof of my mouth so viciously that I almost choked. At the sound of my retching my father looked up, the mountains on his face deepening with… something. Concern? Disapproval?

I excused myself quietly and shuffled into the kitchen for water. I needed to rid my throat of this dry scratchiness; I needed to… Yell? Gasp?

The last dregs of sunlight reached through the worn-wood framed window, bathing the kitchen with an unholy reddish light. I stared bleakly out at the sunset. In another time we might be sitting at the end of our block, rickety camp chairs on prime real estate, blankets on laps and laughter in our mouths. What right had the sky to be so beautiful tonight? Just so normal. Peering down I could almost see those families living normally, watching the sun set, without a dark thought.

The rippled plastic touched my hands as my limbs went through the unconscious task of taking care of my thirst, mindlessly sustaining me. I choked back the stale tap water, feeling only slightly rejuvenated.

Gold gleaming in the light, body floating upwards, arms limp, hands reaching for me as though to take me too.

The cup clattered loudly in the sink, startling me from my reverie.

“Would you pull yourself together?”

Ann behind me. I can hear her arms crossed across her chest without having to turn. I leaned against the cool metal of the sink, eyes closed, the red sunlight burning behind my eyelids.

“Did today just happen?”

A croaked whisper. It took me a moment to realize that the hoarse voice came from my barren lips. A slow, sticky pause settled in the room before Ann moved up next to me. Something about my older sister always seemed ancient to me. Maybe it’s the old adage that women have to grow up faster than men. Ann looked weary, red shadows playing around her eyes.

“She was sick for a long time, you know.”

Her voice trickled out in subdued tones, so as not to reach the other room. I tried to regain my composure but my voice cracked, fragrant as a desert, as I forced out what I had been trying to come to grips with for the past five hours.

“It just took her. No questions, no goodbye. Just gone. As if she never existed.”

She leaned her elbows against the counter, an exasperated sigh playing past her lips, her hands holding up her face. They hold nothing for me. Not a wisp of kindness or hope.

“There are too many of us,” she began slowly, “Everyone who dies is taken for cremation. It’s just easier that way. No graves. Graves take up far too much land. ‘Land is for the living’,” she said, quoting the slogan popularized by every TV personality on every news station. She looked over, meeting my eyes for the first time today, “And no funerals for us to bother with. We’ve got to go right on living. We can’t be bothered with what is past and who is not here anymore.”

My lips, sticky with disagreement, pursed themselves as I stared out the window. By now the sun had dipped its weight below the horizon, leaving only light grey clouds in its wake. Ann and I slowly meandered back to the dinner table to stew in our silent thoughts.

Mine were fixated on the slow abduction of my mother, by drone, to the communal crematoriums in the south side of the city. Its silver claws dipped stealthily into our lives and plucked the most important person away from me, her nightgown dancing in the wind of the propellers, her arms and legs dangling like dredged seaweed, her locket…

“Her locket!”

I said those two words aloud. You would have thought I had dropped some ungodly refuse in the middle of the dinner table. Ann looked sharply at me, her eyes nailing me to the spot. Dad looked up, startled, as though I had just expressed the desire to become a ballerina.

“Mom’s locket. It was still around her neck when it took her.”

My dad’s mouth hung slightly agape, half-chewed chicken peeking out through his teeth. Ann’s sharp gaze softened for a moment, both of the remaining members of my family slowly drawn into a haze of thoughts at the statement I had dared to utter, breaking the sanctity of our silent vigil.

My mother had only one possession of any value: a small, golden, heart-shaped locket about the size of a hummingbird’s egg. Unlike most lockets, which contained a picture of some sort, it had a circular indentation in the front, through which peered a small diamond. She never took it off, claiming that it complemented any fashion.

Dad regained his composure, “Well it’s gone now,” he grunted.

He retreated from the table abruptly, clearing his plate and sectioning himself off in the kitchen. The dishes clattered noisily in… Anger? Dismissal?

“Why the hell,” Ann hissed, “Did you have to go bringing up Mom’s locket for?”

Now it was my turn to stare, mouth agape, as I tried to comprehend the… Shock? Betrayal?

I stared hard down at the table. The dark intricate knots of the cheap pine-wood surface glared up at me, familiar and accusing. They, my old acquaintances, whom I stared at for the long painful minutes of uncomfortable silence when the table sat four. The rivers of wooden imperfection which I traced with my fingers as I heard my parents, their voices raised in their bedroom. The grain of the near-splintered surface comforted and consoled me as I attempted to block out my mother’s increased frailness, as I now tried to block out the wave of shame emanating from Ann and rocking my soul to its core.

I heard Ann sigh and hazarded a look in her direction. Her fingers steepled to her temples, rubbing them as though rubbing a bothersome stain. She finally lowered her arms in front of her. She looked as weary as she used to a lifetime ago, coming home from the rallies that evolved into riots. The news coverage never reflected the worry he felt then for her. His schools in the following years would preach how we should always press forward, how the Law of Lamentation was passed to quell the problems of overpopulation, and if we worked hard we would be able to afford health care and not be one of “those families” who didn’t get to live full lives.

The lessons were always paired with the same canned politicized footage. First the protesters came, the degenerates and hippies who wanted to disrupt what is best for the country as a whole. They indeed looked disruptive, flags and signs waving aggressively, anger apparent on their faces. Then the sirens of the police and the rain of tear gas brought an end to the vigil. They deserved it, or so my teachers would say. The notion that these protesters were bad people for wanting to continue to have the right to bury their dead was always soured by the fact that I knew one of them.

Ann stared balefully across the table at me, the fight that used to stand guard behind her eyes limping away fearfully. When she did speak her voice was softer, wiser, and far more tired.

“We couldn’t afford health care for mom. We didn’t have enough to finish a whole round of chemo. Dad suggested that she sell her locket, that it would cover the basic down payment and that we could take out more loans to cover the rest. She flat out refused. Said that it had been in her family for generations and that it wasn’t going to leave her family for this.”

“And what good did it do her?”

Ann and I spun in our chairs to stare at our father, angry shadows creasing his forehead, a frown harshly cutting down his chin.

“She was stupid. We could have made it work, but she refused. It’s her own damn fault that she’s gone.”

Ann and I were stunned, we had never heard our father speak ill of mom, at least not in front of us. Now his voice was like a geyser, bubbling up heated froth from deep within him.

“Shut up.”

Ann’s face snapped back to me, eyes wide, but I didn’t care. My anger could match my father’s on any day, and I wasn’t going to stand by and let him talk this way about our mother.

His brows glowered at me, frown deepening so that it severed his chin from the rest of his face.

“What did you say to me?”

“Mom didn’t choose for this to happen. You acting like she did doesn’t make you any better for trying to forget her!”

My neck snapped back. The force of the blow to my cheek rocked my chair back, tumbling me to the ground. As my face hit the linoleum it broke. When I next looked up, my vision was blurry. I wiped a balled fist over my eyes and it came away wet.

The collar of my shirt constricted around my throat as I was lifted up, suspended in the air. The angry shadow roared at me.

“You crying boy? There’s no time for that. You stop that right now.”

Wood splintered as I went through the coffee table. I heard Ann screaming. The hazy destruction danced around me as shadows loomed before my eyes.

“No time for grief, we live in the real world. Tomorrow I go back to the factory, Ann goes back to her desk, and you go back to school. Life continues as normal. Nobody will pity us and nobody will let us slack off. Get that through your thick skull because it's the only lesson you need. The world does not care. You are just a cog in the machine to work until the day you rust away and are replaced. You aren’t special so stop acting like it.”

Ann stood off in the corner, stunned. Her young idealism that I had admired all of those years ago was snuffed by years of failure. Years of being the odd one out had forced her into conformity. The air had been sucked from her, whisked off to a land of make-believe.

My father steadied himself. His chest heaved, his shoulders slumped. I watched as the darkness coalesced on his face. A tired anger, hissing and roiling in his cheeks, his eyes sunken beneath a monolithic brow. Then I saw his eyes. His eyes, swirling in the vortex of madness that surrounded them. His eyes held… Pain? Fear? Sorrow? My chest heaved and burned, burned with the sadness that had been shoveling coal into my heart all day long. Burned like my mother. Burned like her locket.

The tears flowed freely then, my breath coming haltingly, seizing like the waves crashing over me. Breathing, though I couldn’t get enough breath. My face burned as well, hot coursing tears clashing with the shame, betrayal, and loss. Mixing to form a sorrow that I could never recover from.

Our eyes locked and a single diamond tear clung in the corner of his eye. His gaze reached out to me, though his body was locked in place. I stared into those eyes and longed for comfort.

But night came, and all was normal.