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Randall K. Rogers

I’m gonna write a novel. Here goes.

Write, write, write. There. Finished.

    I had a one armed man that I kept in my closet. He was dead, and smelled real bad, but I didn’t care back then. Neither did Mom. I lived with Mom. She upstairs in the condo and me downstairs. We got the condo from my dead uncle who had a heart attack at fifty four. Guy drove himself to the hospital while he was having the heart attack. Then they gave him an experimental blood clot dissolving drug. He, being a hemophiliac, the drug caused the blood to seep into his lungs and almost drown him. He said they stuck a huge needle attached to what looked like a turkey baster into his lungs and pumped out what looked like French Dressing. He lasted a week or so in the hospital, went home, got progressively weaker, went back into the hospital and died. Left the condo, his Toronado, his stock and bond portfolio to my Mom. She left the city she was in and came to live in his condo, now sort of wealthy with his money. Soon I, smelling a padded nest, moved my way in.
    It was Mom upstairs with the vodka and me downstairs with the herb. We rarely got in the way of each other’s buzzes. Which along with a full refrigerator and no rent to pay made living for me there nice. But then I went off to teach in Ukraine, came back a year later, Mom was in tough shape. I swear she barely took five tiny bites in a month though daily downed a quart of vodka and smoked two packs of cigarettes. She took sick leave from work, and sat and watched movies smoked and drank. I tried to prepare food for her. “The vodka goes down well,” she said when I commented on her lack of taking nourishment.
    I predicted it. So did she but not as accurately as I. I called my brother and told him in excited concerned tones “if we don’t do another intervention she’ll be dead in two weeks!”
     He responded, “let her die.” Must have been a bad day for him. I was bothering him with ‘alarmist’ views.
    She died in two weeks, to the day.
    The day I found the dead guy Mom had stashed behind the log stack in the garage. The decaying smelling one armed dead guy. When or how or why or even if she killed him, I don’t know. But he was there. And even the cops didn’t smell him when I called 911 to report her death and the dyke cop came and stood by me and Mom’s body and watched me, watched my reactions. At one point she picked up my pack of Export A Canadian cigarettes, held them to her nose and suspiciously smelled them. She asked “What are these?”
    “Cigarettes,” I said, and took one from the pack and lit it. She continued to watch me. I sat down a few feet from the corpse, on the same couch as dead Mom. She wasn’t too chatty. I put my face in my hands so it would look like I was grieving more. Still the cop lady suspected, I guessed they are trained like dogs that way, to observe. I looked at her, standing there looking at me, then looked over to the corpse and shook my head. Then the paramedics came in a sort of rush to save her and I said they could take it easy, she’s gone. They took blood and tried some stuff for show I think, stuff to revive her like shocking her, but nothing worked. She jerked a little bit and you could see she had peed her pants but she was stone dead. Then the detective came and said to me “you’re not going to like me asking these questions.” I cleared myself of a murder charge with the help of my uncle who arrived just in time and told the cops she had just gotten out of the hospital and she had been sick (i.e. drunk) at home for a month, away from work.
    All the cops left too, the paramedics left and it was just me and my uncle and her. And like I said earlier she wasn’t saying much. After ten minutes or so of awkward silence sitting me uncle and Mom in the TV room, uncle and I agreed we should move to the living room, leaving Mom to watch the TV by herself, which I finally turned off. We waited three hours in dumb comment punctuated silence before the funeral home people came to get her. When the stretcher with her on it went down the stairs and out the door I turned my face to the sliding glass door and tried to look out past the reflection. “I don’t want to watch her go,” I said.
    Then it was four in the morning and my uncle left. It was me alone in the condo. I stayed upstairs for a while and waved to maybe her spirit stuck on the ceiling. Then I went downstairs, sat down in front of the TV, turned on a blacksploitation film that was on American Movie Classics and did four big bongs of fine weed. And I didn’t even get high. Later I cried and yelled at the heavens and Mom’s spirit. “I loved you!” I wept, I cried hamming it up for the dead ancestors “I love you Mom!”
    Later I went out in the garage and found the one armed dead man. I took his rotting remains and put them in my downstairs bedroom closet. Why?
    Why not? I dumped out and washed out Mom’s vodka glass before the cops first arrived too. Didn’t want them to think she drank herself to death, and was a murderer too.



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