MicroHorror

Mavis dismounted the stair-lift. Her steps imprinted into the carpet, showing that she always kept to the left. Those steps had kept the same measure for too many rusty-hipped years. Even the tip of her walking stick had its own little marks just like needle tracks in the carpet.

She was keeping the house out of spite more than anything. Mavis was pretty much sick to death of her kids hounding her to move somewhere smaller. Telling her how they’d handle everything, the estate agents, the lawyers, and the removals men.

Mavis may sometimes forget where she’d left a remote and would find it in the fridge a few days later, but she still had enough of the grey matter spitting sparks for her to know that what they said in words translated to numbers in their wallets.

It angered her; they hadn’t been brought up that way. She’d thought there’d been a balance between them being given what they needed and what they wanted; obviously she’d been wrong. They were more intrigued about how she was feeling whenever they came around, looking at her the way a doctor would, rather than with the loving eyes of a child. They moved through the hallways as though they were surveying the structure rather than remembering their childhood days. Especially Nick, her eldest. He had his father’s mouth, but that was all he had of his father, reckoned Mavis.

She disrobed and de-toothed, then got into bed. She looked at her late husband Tom who stood proud in the garden. In her memory of that moment he’d been framed by trees. In the photograph he was skirted by faux silver.

Mavis could hear their song playing, “Twelfth of Never” by Johnny Mathis. It sounded so clear, not like an echo from some cavern in her crumbling mind, but real, external. Mavis sat up and smiled wistfully. She hadn’t a wireless in her bedroom, nor had she one of those compact deck contraptions that didn’t work when you put the other side on.

It couldn’t be a memory. Mavis pushed back the bedding as though it were a tide. She used the stick to help her towards the sound. It was coming from outside. Her ears were just as good as they’d always been; it was just that sometimes the words turned to stone, like Medusa had peeped at them once they’d gotten inside.

With the crook of the stick she separated the heavy curtains. She didn’t bother about anyone gawking in and seeing her in only two layers of cotton; trees stood sentry around the garden.

Mavis opened the window. One of those good old-fashioned ones, the kind that are a match for neither arthritis nor burglars. It was another one of those things that Mavis had been adamant about keeping whenever one of her adoring children tried to coax her into lavishing money on the house to “bring it up to date” and now it was paying off.

He was there. Tom was in the center of the lawn wearing his favorite light grey suit. His face was only half seen beneath the trilby that had practically been more a part of him than the marrow in his bones.

“Tom!” she called.

The head dipped and rose, but only enough to show his mouth.

“Come to me, Mave. Let’s make it the Twelfth of Forever.”

Her heart tripled, tightening the blue wires of veins and arteries. She smiled. She knew the feeling of an angina attack; she didn’t care. She could be with Tom.

The man in the trilby looked at Mavis on the ground. It didn’t take much for the fall to work her calcified joints to make elaborate shapes from her limbs.

The man in the trilby spoke, staring at the body. “It’s okay, she’s dead.” He looked up as his younger brother and sister came out of the shadows like scavenging cowards, now that the kill had been made by the pack leader.