Short Story Family – N For Noxious
Photo credit: Carool from morguefile.com
My mother is harebrained, lithe, sinuous, armed with zany humour and throws her weight behind the newfangled society, but she’s ancient of avant-garde things. She’s enamoured of wacky songs, anti-novels, dachshunds, Bubblegum-haired, a fully oval sandbrown face with constantly flickering deep-set limpid turquoise blue eyes, and a soprano voice. An incurable romantic ( and a lookist), she’s currently nailed it with her fifth husband, Lt. Lestrade, to whom she lost her heart the moment she sighted him on the flight to Toronto. “He looked so heart-stoppingly dashing in that tuxedo, and he’s got a goofy sense of humour! But he’s generally ataraxic… And you know what?! He too goes gaga over Tarantino, Atwood, Marquez….” she rambled breathlessly, moonily, the night she returned home after her long-awaited itinerary with her saucy, bitchy pals.
( My mother calls me very ‘astute’ and ‘ prescient’. That’s sheer tommy rot, I reassure you. I’m a simple minded girl, lambent-skinned, doe-eyed)
But ,in my capacious mind, my Dad would always be the deceased sociology professor, Matt Wheldon. His sojourn in my life was like an abrupt spurt of spring in the arid demesne of my ‘ skulking ‘ soul, he hued my world with the vibrancy of tranquillity and suppleness and budded in me a veneration and adulation for my roots, which now lies furled up in sedate, shady suburb off Survey Park, tucked into South Kolkata, Bengal. He wasn’t amorphous, scatterbrained and boggy like Mum. He slipped away unobtrusively, one night, courtesy an aneurysm.
My mother behaved egregiously( since she was one gregarious person, driven to the edge): she went to party( wild and wanton) even the following night, clad in skimpy attire( as my neighbours moral policed , lambasted her, soberly shaking their heads, crappy models of rectitude).
Since then, Mum and I have drifted apart, we’ve become strangers met on a chance encounter; whenever we run into each other, something electric gets elicited and zaps in the spaces between us, spaces which scream obscenities. I deride her for her windy, tempestuous , half -baked romances, and her blitheness to Matt’s death. I’m still reeling in the aftershocks of Dad’s death ( although it’s been three years since the death) , whereas she’s gone bestial-mode, swinging her head off , burning the night away with crass, crude hipster-ish jerks and twerks. I’m a living limbo, caged in a quagmire, an impasse tethered precariously to the brink of non-reality, prone to paroxysms of intermittent flashes of rumination.
The morning’s crisply balmy; Mum’s watching some rollicking family drama, packed with histrionics, and I, Adele crooning ,” When we were young” in my ear, wedge Dorito into my mouth, as well as reading my doctoral essay, teeming with platitudes to three epochs of African Literature. Peering around to appreciate the recently refurbished living room, my subconscious pipes or literally barks, This is for Lestrade, dolt.
I bristle inwardly at the grim realization.
” Oh, Alissa, did i tell you: Lestrade’s comin’ home tonight, he’ll be with us for few weeks. You know, it’s his furlough. Then, he’ll be flying to Michigan to pay a visit to his folks. Isn’t it great??” Mum chirps.
I feign pleasure, but i think she she fathoms it, for she quickly shuttles her eyes away to the TV, albeit an ad’s going on.
The day wears on lackadaisically, night rolls in.
Plaintive songs of lassitude envelop us, as i watch Mum peppering her grandiose chocolate cake with rare verve. I steal glances at the firmament, which looks so aglow, so bubbling with life, so heart-meltingly exquisite. Mum tattles on frothily, and i feel quietude cocooning me, cradling me, and everything dims, blurs, dips out of view, turns inky …….
” She’s very condescending when it comes to Booker-winning literature”, Mum’s words jolt me back into austere reality, and my eyes fly open.
Befuddled and disoriented, I lumber to the remote circle of light. There’s a weird aroma wafting around . I manage to make it to the room, which is illuminated with chandeliers and god-knows-what; tarot cards lie piled on the glass-topped central table, spattered with blood. Everything else in the room is spick and span. The air’s damp , fusty and thick with ghastliness.
There’s Mum, looking scraggly, unimaginably slovenly, feral, auburn hair gone askew, skin leached of beauty; she reeks of death, and insipid things. Her mouth’s smeared with blood, eyes shot with the avarice of bloodlust, evil is suffused in her soul. She’s been feasting on, after having romped with, a statuesque, waxed corpse; the corpse speaks of an avuncular persona, sapience, a podginess shadowing his physique.
I blanch. The body’s turned frigid, shorn of life, totally inanimate; lips have become chapped and smoky, eyelashes withered , eyes torn and gobbled ; death dissipates from every inch of him; its starkness cloud the physique.
Her tongue lolls, laced with wet anticipation, and her teeth literally windmill around in his torso, mashing, churning, gnashing everything, leaving not an iota or dime of shapeliness in him.
A strange, murky bonding has woven the twosome, the atmosphere has become very grisly, gory, and too repugnant and odious…..
I cringe.
Presently, she drives a hefty box cutter mercilessly, unsparingly, theatrically through him, and a titanic sea of blood springs and wends out of his depths, as he judders under the onslaught. She mats her face with the dark blood, and guffaws maniacally, insanely. I am in a thrall to the revoltingly deranged monomania.
A photograph flaps, under the paperweight; the man in the photo is burly, brawny, jaunty, with a hoodlum’s twirl-edged moustache, sallow-complexioned, aquiline. Two words are written in a hasty hand on the blank back: Lt. Tommasso Lestrade. Beside, in Mum’s evident alert, wary hand are added- “loves Alicia Bennet” ( it’s her name, of course)
There’s a screech of tires on the gravel. Hmmm, another quarry. A beleaguered , insatiable college coterie, I surmise.
Something goes haywire, furls, and erupts in my gut , wrenching me apart. A familial craving lances through me, and I lunge for the brutal feast: the slithery tongue’s nastily delectable!!! It’s sapid to my burning tongue!! A sprightliness cleaves through me.
A youthful husky voice says: “ This one? But it’s too creepy! I’ve heard it’s two sole denizens killed each other in one of its rooms. There’s it- that one, on the second floor, extreme left”.
I follow the interloping eyes scuttling upwards and their glares thud on the battered stained-glass windowpanes,
Yeah, it’s gonna be one helluva night!!!!!!!
–END–
