Mother Drops Her Pills in the Garbage
She put up with a lot, by her lights, grudgingly going to the doctor after she’d dropped thirty pounds in two months. She took home the pamphlets: Diabetes and You, Dr. Anselm’s Program for Diabetics, The Diabetic Gourmet. She learned how to stick her finger with a needle and to stab insulin into her thigh, and she kept to herself how she hated it. She cooked the same dinners for Dad and for us when we came on Sundays. If she had a bite of dessert, she learned to compensate for it. She only regained a few of the thirty pounds, but refused to buy new clothes, because why? When she fell down the basement steps on her way to do the laundry, she dragged herself back to the top, one leg and one arm broken. She’d be fine. She could manage.
But somehow the calcium pills the doctor prescribed (for her osteoporosis, although it was too late really to do anything about that)—she couldn’t stand for them; horse pills, too big to swallow, too foul tasting to chew up. Every night, she sat on the stool by the kitchen counter, watching me or my sister make her dinner, keeping an eye on what we were doing because, after all, we were kids, practically, and what did we know about cooking? She ate what we made and when we brought her pills in a cup, she took them and sat for a while, “to let dinner settle.” When we weren’t looking, she dropped the horse pill into the garbage can, and pretended to be watching TV, although Dad was watching golf, which she had never liked.
Of course, we yelled at her. Because we wanted her bones to be strong for the rest of her life, which we knew to be infinite. Because we didn’t know what the home care nurse knew. Because we were stupid. We were in the mindset of healing because we knew her to be immortal, and she was in the mindset of letting go. Sometimes, we noticed the pill going down and produced another. Sometimes, she swallowed the pill down with only a bit of complaint. But sometimes, the pill went into the garbage so cleverly, hiding under a cabbage leaf or a clot of coffee grounds, and when that happened she was winning, and it’s not a bad thing to win even so small a thing in the last weeks of your life.
Mary Grimm has had three books published, Left to Themselves, Transubstantiation, and Stealing Time. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction, including Helen: A Literary Magazine, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a series of climate change novellas set in past and future Cleveland.
