Family success is a mess arranged neatly by generations. In our family, one male heir was allowed to be born every hundred years. This is how I came to be, and though I was a centenarian, I knew what I had to do. I think the pressure, though it may seem small to some of you inhibited me so that, at a relatively young age, I decided to forget all about sex and fertilisation of the female kind. Of course I knew the mechanics. And I knew all about love between a man and a woman from Shakespeare whose sonnets were shelved on my private loo upstairs. I spent long hours there beyond need leafing through the depth of the human soul in heat. Yet, it was theoretical knowledge, dry and wispy, and I had not talked to a woman besides mother in a long time let alone touched one.

She was called Hilda, born and bred in Heidelberg, Germany. She was clearly made of oak and had sprung straight from an acorn into a life doting on dotards. I had spotted her from my window and thrown her a dirty look upon which she approached the front, jumped over the garden gate, stomped past the dead flower beds and over the lavender that grew like a weed, and rang the door bell.

It took me a while to get downstairs, and when I opened the door, I was surprised at her voice, which had a silken quality to it like that of someone slumbering with their eyes open and their tongue heavy.  I need someone to help me take care of my mother, I said, and I couldn’t help noticing your strong upper arms and calves. Well, here I am, she said, with a tone that revealed she was flattered, quite contrary to my expectations, and arranged her mouth to a smile. She seemed not worried about my unusual manner of hiring. I asked her in and explained her duties. She would have to live in the house and allow me to lead a life of my own. She would have to turn mother twice daily. She would have to change her diapers, make her food and sit by her every day for a little while talking to her about anything at all. Hilda’s curiosity about our household, if it existed, was completely concealed by the natural restraint of her people. There was little more to say and she seemed happy to retreat to her room downstairs.

There was no talk of moving mother to the basement anymore. I already felt sorry for my outburst the other day.

Mothers rarely make the news except when they give birth to squids, take to a neutering knife or hover (weightlessly) over the family dinner table. My mother was no different. She would’ve made the news if anyone had known how old she was, but somehow she’d fallen off the grid as I had. Without her man, she was going it alone and I was all that was left. I remember how mother took me to the place where she had to drop off knitted cylindrical hats made to cover loo rolls, something that petty people seemed to like then: a naked toilet roll was an insult to their eyes. I don’t imagine the job paid well. I didn’t care though: I was happy to help her carry a bag full of knitware in all colours and spend three hours chatting with her, or just listen to her talk about herself. I cannot recall anything mentioned on that day, but I do remember my feeling of intense happiness to have mother all to myself, and to see her so beautiful, tall and blonde and strong, moving about the train despite her burden, holding her head high in the shabby office building where women from everywhere filed past a snotty receptionist, dropped her measly millinery, got paid, and trotted home again. Many of them accompanied by kids of all ages, colours, sizes and moods.

Knowing mother, I felt she and Hilda would hit it off. And if I was right, I would’ve held my first promise to myself, leaving me with the greater task of finding a way into the outside world, which did not know anything about me. I was going to leave the cosy path of the casual observer and step into the raunchy river, clasping my fear like a cookie gone cold and hard in my hand. Having passed the only person who could possibly care about me into someone else’s hands, I now needed to find other people who might care for me, and care about them.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt, continuing where resurrection (flying fox) left off.

The city grew around the small brick house like an oyster around a dark pearl of uncertain nature. Inside the house, the two old people moved little as if saving themselves for a long journey. Outside, the brown village road turned high and black when the city swallowed the suburbs and spread its tentacles, touching more and more lives, eating more and more bodies, tying people and animals to its rhythm: ca-choom, ca-choom, ca-choom.

Mother lost her speech today. She wouldn’t talk when I brought her breakfast and she hadn’t called, which normally would’ve worried me but I was so deep in my thoughts, mostly about how very much everything, anything needed to change that I must not have heard her if indeed she did call. Which she might not have. I could see that she hadn’t just lost her voice but that something worse was going on because her eyes were wide open staring at me with what I interpreted as fear, and she moved her mouth like a fish, opening and closing it at equal intervals … at first I was shocked: mother, I said, what happened, can you not speak? But of course she couldn’t or she wouldn’t, and so she didn’t shower me with accusations this morning and it was  as if, in a tick, my inner clockwork was relaxing. I felt lighter and almost giddy because now I could talk with no fear of being interrupted or scolded:

I really enjoyed the sunrise this morning, mother you know and there was movement on the street which woke me early, perhaps it was a fox, I thought, but foxes don’t come so close to town, and then I realised I didn’t even know how close to the centre of town we were now and I looked for a map but you know what, they were all really old as is almost everything around here because neither you nor I have done anything about it since father died, I said, and I didn’t really want to stop talking at all.

He did die, didn’t he, I said, all of a sudden unsure. And mother, whose eyes had assumed a calmer expression, perhaps because she was beginning to resign herself to the fact that now I was doing the talking, all the talking, though her fingers were nervously tapping or trembling, I don’t know which, or both (so that I could see she was dying to speak!), mother nodded and began to cry. Fine, I thought, let her cry. I did miss father, too. And then it all poured out of me.

We live in a morgue, I said (I don’t know where that word came from), and you’ve kept me by your side for the longest time but I’m fed up now. I once wanted to become one of the best of men, and all I did become is your wheezing caretaker with nothing but a chair to call my own, and a window to look out of. I didn’t mind when I was twenty, I was still restless at thirty, a little too lazy to do anything else at forty, felt desperately unattractive and unwanted at fifty, and since my sixties I have felt too old to do anything ever than wait, but now, forty years on, I’ve had enough and my life must finally begin.

Mother shook her fist at me and made efforts to get up. I pushed her down. You don’t have the leg muscles, mother, you’d fall and break something and I don’t even know a doctor anymore or how to get one, I said. There had been no need – longevity and good health sheltered us like curtain shutters, kept us alive and well without pills and medical miracles.

I wanted to get out there and see what humanity had done in the last hundred years.

I am going to get a paid helper for you, mother, I said, and I’m going to move you to the basement.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt, continuing where reclination (chair man) stopped.

I’d completed my chores. Mother said I could go play with my beard now. I was one-hundred and twelve years old and she still ordered me around like a busboy. I was going to go to my room upstairs: there stood my lounger, a comfortable chair with a foot stool. Its cover looked vaguely Victorian. It was like a large vagina I could settle in and nothing could touch me anymore. This was a curious notion, I knew that. The chair stood by the window overlooking Dwindlestreet. I could watch people go in and out of the bakery. I could rest my arm on the sill when the sun, our sensible star, came out. I could climb a rainbow if only I wanted and walk away, though I never did in all those years.

I took my boots off outside the room. Slimy mudcake snails clung to the soles. I abhorred soil or sand on my own floor. I noticed a hole in the sock on my left foot. Or was it the right foot? For a moment, I couldn’t remember. That scared me. But since there were two feet, one was the left, the other one the right. As far as I could see, nothing depended on my knowledge of their handedness. (“The handedness of my feet”, what an odd expression that was.) Unlike on board of a ship or a road vehicle where left or right could mean life or death: cliffs on the left, open water on the right. An abyss on the left, a welcoming tavern on the right. Or in politics, though I never thought those on the right much different from those on the left, at least not once they tasted the sweet, gluey juice of power. Politicians were men with many words, and they talked in many tongues, few of them truthful. Perhaps that’s why people didn’t vote anymore, because they couldn’t keep left and right apart.

With such thoughts, which were typical for the way I was, enough time had passed to forget the hole in my sock and I now stood in my room: it was blissfully disordered, an asymetrical artistic antipode to mother’s space, which filled the rest of the house like a vacuum, while in my room gravity still worked as it should. Down was where my feet were, up where my head was, except when I laid down, which I avoided as much as possible for fear I might not be able to get up again. Hence I slept in my chair instead of my bed, which was covered with an ugly spread that mother had chosen and put on the bed in my absence. She had stitched the coverlet herself: it showed Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe: a naked woman, quizzically looking at the viewer, sat on a lawn among trees having breakfast with two bearded dressed men. It was a peculiar painting that had once defined a new way of looking at painting nature and helped people of that time avoid looking at nature as such. I figured it also was pornographic in a way, with the woman being hot as a daughter of hell – I would’ve had her, before or after breakfast. These were considerations that made me hold my breath whenever I looked at mother’s work, which surely was spying on me: the eyes of the woman were mother’s eyes. She was always out to confront me in order to keep me engaged and stimulated. She didn’t want to be left and who could blame her.

My chair stood by the window and that’s where I was headed now, without even looking at the bed or at the cover’s oedipal summoning. Don’t shuffle so, mother said all the time. But I know she was just jealous because she hadn’t left her bed downstairs in years. She was so fat that I could only turn her with the help of a small crane, and I had to turn her twice a day – because of her sores, she said, but I knew it was because she got bored with one side of the room, then the other. I was not like that: I never got bored with the view out my window from the chair I longed to sit in.

When I’d reached it, I sat down, put my feet up on the stool, moved my toes a bit to make the blood rush back up my legs into my genitals and further up past my hip, up my chest, where hair still grew in the unruliest way, white now. It grew, fed by my blood, grew up from there, bushier even at the neck where the chest fleece turned flat and wiry and became: my beard, which was my proudest possession in the whole world. I stroked it, I made love to it, bent the hairs upward tickling my nose. I wasn’t totally in control of what was happening, that was the fun of it, the terms of touch. I felt like an old tiger now and I groaned with the pleasure that a plan well planned and processed brought his rightful owner.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt