What used to be a house is now a room. And in that room, what used to be a girl and then a mother is now an old woman in a recliner facing the western wall’s window. She listens for that strange bird call again. It frustrates her that she can’t place the call to the bird. She had heard it the day before and hears it again now.
Plants suffer on the windowsill from a lack of sunlight, but she often waters and talks to them. Just sweet encouragements and the like. She can help that, but can’t help the direction of the lone window and the little sunlight it provides the plants.
Beside the wilting plants are faces behind glass: a son and a daughter with their spouses and children, and another son and daughter who she will never see again because they’ve died years ago.
The faces behind the glass are just that: faces behind the glass.
They watch her do so little each and every repeating day that she almost feels embarrassed if one can feel that while all alone, but she watched everything; watched them grow up, nursed them all from her own body, cooked for them and cleaned up after them. Before she was an old woman she used to drive a car, a new used one every income tax season, and with that car she had picked them up from school when their bellies hurt or they burned up from a fever. Sometimes she left work early when they had an early dismissal from school. She lived a life doing everything for everyone, yet never getting anything done for herself. Now her children and grandchildren live with her in those picture frames yellowed and dusty.
Though her room is small, she can’t move around like she used to. She wants to, but her legs disagree with her. Her lungs too. That’s what the oxygen tanks and tubes are for. The tubes would tangle her if she could move fast enough, so she shuffles her ever-cold feet, barely lifting them from the ground (which she tries to clean, but it still leaves her feet blackened like she walked over ash). It’s just tile. Gray tile and white walls and yellow dusty pictures.
Outside of that western window she sees a tree that she’d love to hang a bird feeder from, and she thinks of how she’d stop the squirrels from stealing the seeds. She thinks a sun catcher would be pretty to look at it. She’d always wanted one, maybe in the shape of a dragon or a bee’s nest, but she never got one for Christmas. There wasn’t enough sun in this window anyway.
She thought of all the things she wanted to do, which remined her of all the things she couldn’t do. Still, she will make do. As she always has. She rocks a bit in her recliner, sipping on hot instant coffee. She can’t muster the energy to put a full pot together anymore, and her doctor says she can’t have coffee anyway. But she could do what he can’t know.
The coffee is good.
She’s comfortable.
And while she can’t really go outside anymore, she listens again for that strange bird call, hoping soon to know what creature is making that sound. Little things like that keep her at the window.
Tyler is the author of HAVE MERCY and a former journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Penn State University, and a M. A. in creative writing with a focus on fiction from Wilkes University. He’s published multiple short stories and one of them, “That Time Aliens Made Us Vegan,” was nominated for the “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Award” in 2018.