Madness sketch in three parts

---Part 1---

   The only reason she has to know night from day are the rows of pills that by now pass for food, clinging to her withered throat on the way down to her ravaged stomach so she still feels ghosts of them at midday. She regrets her childern, her sons willingly flown to nest in foreign houses with strange women she only sees for Thanksgiving, making her feel like a cuckoo once more, sending her own flesh and blood out so unprepared. To pass her last days, she reads. And the shuffle of the pages almost echoes through the corridors of the silent house, the noise of every leaf growing more intrusive until it is like thunder and she swears she can detect the wrinked skin of her fingers rustling imperceptibly as she turns to the next page. Setting the book down for the first time in hours, she wanders like the whisper of a wraith down the hall and to the window, surveying the street. In hope or in fear, she can no longer tell. Through the years, distinguishing between the two became impossible, the line blurred as the two sentiments blended together like watercolours as vague as her own memories. The street is silent and her heart slows behind her ribs and she can slowly feel herself fading, dissloving into her house until she can not hear her own body slip to the floor for her children to discover eventually. Her modest parting gift.

---Part 2---

   The funeral was understated, the sons had flown into town for the afternoon, gathered ceremoniously in cuffed trousers with appropriately pale women at their side. One of them could have shown hint of a tear, but he had been the youngest, the last to suckle at her breast, the last to spread his wings. The loss would not touch him long.
   They had found her strewn across the floor, as though she wasn't solid, a shapeless mass of human that bore resemblance only in description. A faint odour through the house and the first muted thought through Lilian's mind was of rose petals. White and scattered across the floorboards by the window, just so as to resemble a figure.
  "It's just like her," her husband had said, "to leave without calling."
   The words were meant as a joke, but hung heavily in the stale room. They blended with death, stinging Lilian's ears so she had to look at her husband to make sure she'd married the right man, her thoughts suddenly aeolian. Instead, it made her think of being remembered. This was a woman who would never inspire a biography in her name, whose eulogy would be brief for lack of knowledge, the preacher's speech would stop embarrassingly short and unpunctuated on "She will be remembered beyond this day," as if he didn't know any better. Her name and significant dates in granite would outlive her image in the memories of her children. The remaining solid fact about her was that she was their mother, or rather, that they had had a mother. Any further details were irrelevant. One didn't carry on stimulating business conversation about one's deceased parents, and the unremarkable woman was hardly a fitting topic over dinner.
   Was she the only one in the entire family to really feel something for this woman, Lilian asked herself, as her eyes searched desperately for tears in the eyes of Ruth's four children. But she gave herself too much credit, her sentiments motivated by fears and egocentricity; for this death had simply played on her illusions of immortality, bringing her to question the validity of her hopes to live beyond physical disintegration. For she was no Groucho Marx herself. She had yet to bear any children of her own, her only remaining hope at indirectly leaving her stamp upon the world was fading like a passing train into a foggy horizon, offering but silent parallel tracks as a memory. So she did what none of the others would. She wept for herself.

---Part 3---

The day was exactly two years after Ruth's funeral, though no-one knew it - just as expected, she had drifted from the minds of her family. The woman's existence was now but a shadow with a name, disappeared into a sea of omniana without a chance at a protest. Lilian sat at her window looking out into the vespertine rain which blurred the world outside, crawling like transparent snails across the glass, the wind at their helms. In a few minutes her husband would be home, typically punctual. She envisioned him running from his car, a shiny black letterman for his shield, held poised above his head against the falling damp, bounding in great leaps over puddles across the distance from the car to the doorstep.
At the precise moment that her imagined husband disappeared under the shelter of the roof above the front porch, her real husband's car pulled into the drive and the now solid man leapt from the car like a disoriented beast, his shoes landing in the gaps between the puddles where her vision's feet had landed just moments before. Seven steps and the solid man disappeared under the porch roof, the ensuing doorbell bringing her out of the reverie.
Letting her husband in, she tried to smile customarily but sensed that he knew as soon as he stepped through the door. Just as a confined nervous animal paces his cage, the noise from her husband's footsteps walked the walls of the house and she followed him with her ears. She knew today was the worst day, that the timing was off, that telling him now was the worst choice she could make and she knew it, yet she told him anyway.
"Rick, dear," and the first words came out broken and as uncontrolled as a boiling kettle. A second try at vocal expression proved more successful and she managed to cough up: "I have to speak to you," into the gas-chamber of tension. "I'm pregnant," she explained quickly before her tongue had a chance to freeze.
The silence cut like an abortionist's needle. "Is it mine?" he finally asked.
A nervous laugh and a quick nod of the head.
"Fuck," was his response.
"I thought we decided we wanted a child."
"Two years ago, you whore," and the back of his hand across her face would have hurt less. Her tears fell freely. "I have a fucking deal in Hong Kong. Do you know how that's going to be? Do you know what this means? Fuck ... What are we going to do?" His voice was suddenly a whisper and he was seated and shaking in the chair like a terrified child.
"I made you dinner," she replied, suddenly somniloquent.
He eyed her and repeated softly: "What are we going to do, Lilian?" But she ignored the question. The child was born in December and named Cassandra. Like Marilyn Monroe, but different.