In Short – Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

May 31, 2024

Image credit: Dragonarium, Flickr

What Fresh Hell?

By Donna Cameron

The moment I open the dishwasher, our plan crumbles. It had been simple: I would load the dusty plates, bowls, and glasses from Mom’s cupboards into the dishwasher, and then scrub the shelves. My sister would wipe the grimy counters and scrape the muck from the countertop appliances. Mom would return from the hospital to a gleaming kitchen.

But the dishwasher is already full. Crammed with canned and packaged food. Rice-a-Roni a decade past its pull-date, cake mixes hardened to bricks, tins of tomato sauce bulging ominously against blackened cans of tuna. My stomach lurches.

“How come we haven’t noticed this before?” I ask Julie.

“She said she didn’t like to use the dishwasher. When I visit, we go out to eat.”

“Same here,” I say, remembering deli sandwiches or restaurant meals on my infrequent visits. I open her pantry cupboard. It, too, is stuffed with long-expired food and grotty kitchenware. Black mites burrow through an ancient package of white rice. In one corner, though, are half-gallon bottles of vodka and gin, on which no dust has accumulated.

Musty odors permeate every corner. A yellow film clings to surfaces, residue of countless cigarettes smoked in solitude over the twenty years she’s lived here. Every drawer, every cupboard, is crammed with compendia of excursions to Walgreen’s or late-night television shopping forays. Junk jewelry, anti-aging creams, and expired medications crowd her sink and bathroom cabinets. We count two hundred sweaters—many still in store packaging—swelling from dresser drawers, massing under her bed, and spilling out onto once-white carpet.

“She’s not coming home, you know,” I say, realization dawning. I nudge a cabinet door shut, its contents fighting to escape.

“But her doctor said—” Julie stops and looks around. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

This is our penance. Not that it will ever atone for moving to distant cities and creating lives she wasn’t a part of. Reparations will be paid only after she is gone. Each grubby item washed, every article of clothing laundered for donation, every unsalvageable thing tossed, will be stacked against our duty, weighed against our neglect, and put toward a debt that will never be stamped “paid.”

There is no escape. I look around. Forcing myself to exhale, I show Julie the key that’s been in my pocket.

“What do you suppose is in her storage unit?”

Donna Cameron (she/her) is author of the Nautilus award-winning book A Year of Living Kindly. She considers herself an activist for kindness, though admits to occasional lapses into crankiness. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, Thanatos, and many other publications. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.