LAST WORD

By Glyn Matthews

I found my mother hanging from the washing post, toes ballet dancing over a blue plastic basket with diamond perforations, ideally placed to catch her guts if they should fall.

I toyed with images of pigs and abattoirs and steaming eviscerations. Stainless steel vessels. Shiny hooks. Ribs shining like xylophones.

Men, white wellied, jump-suited. Just their eyes showing, with laughter lines, so used to death it didn’t matter anymore.

I should marry a man from an abattoir. He could wear his uniform and I, my wedding dress, we could waltz around the bedroom like plastic dancers on a cake, then fuck.

But, now?

Her toes had finished twitching, her neck at a painful angle (had she not been dead). Her patterned pinny like feathers somehow, a tabard of lightweight cotton catching the summer breeze.

Hanging the washing and herself, together, killed two birds with one stone, I suppose.

In the breeze she twisted round, a row of gipsy pegs trapped in her bloodless mouth, like dreams in which you spit out overcrowded teeth. For once she couldn’t give me a mouthful.

But still I felt cheated.

While waiting for the ambulance, I sat my dad in the garden with a cuppa while I took some pictures on my phone.

On the day of the funeral I penned a note and tucked it in her open coffin. Folded it and stuffed it down between her breasts, when no one was watching.

For once I had the last word.

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