Dragons With Cancer

She's been dead in her bedroom for going on a week now. To say that the house has gotten a little whiffy would be more than just a mild understatement but the scent actually brings me copious amounts of joy.

I love that she's in there, dead and rotting and far from beautiful. If there's one thing that she would have hated, it would be to leave behind a hideously decomposed corpse. She was always so into her looks, wanting to be as gorgeous as any movie star ever was. And this wasn't a preference she bestowed on only herself. She thought everyone should look like a model and in fact, had said on numerous occasions that if a man didn't look as good as, say, Paul Newman, she had absolutely no use for him.

"Ugliness is a deformity," she would tell me even before I was old enough to understand what "deformity" meant. "You got yours from your father's parents. It never occurred to me that ugliness would skip a generation. That thin stringy hair and those freckles can't be blamed on me. And that upturned nose. I have no idea where that came from."

I would sometimes sit on her bed, watching her get ready for an evening out, carefully applying her makeup and doing her hair just so. Wearing only the most elegant gowns, with purse and shoes to match.

She was stunning and no one knew it better than her.

As the years passed, the unforgiving ravages of time didn't seem to have much effect on her flawless features. She assumed the creams and lotions she'd been drowning herself in for years were doing their jobs.

Without fail, people would tell her, "You are easily the most beautiful forty-year-old I have ever seen!"

And then came forty-five and fifty and she still seemed to be blessed by God. Even at fifty-five and sixty she was told she looked ten years younger than she actually was, but slowly this was grating on her nerves.

"Ten years younger?" she would say to me when were we alone. "And that's supposed to be a compliment? Why don't they just come right out and say I should be put out to pasture and shot?"

That was when the plastic surgeons were called in to work their special breed of magic. Only the best in their field were even permitted to evaluate my mother. If a promise of shaving off any less than twenty-five years, the doctor was quickly informed that he was a quack and should be put out to pasture himself.

Eventually, she found what she was looking for and went under the knife only to come out looking not twenty-five years younger, but thirty!

She was positively blissful with the results and went back in for "a few touch-ups" every year until she was seventy.

And then the cancer bloomed within her immaculate body. No matter what kind of care she took of her outer shell, like the rest of us, she was helpless to control the things that could break down inside the machinery.

I was called home to care for her, which I did, because that is what children do. There were nurses for a while, all of whom were eventually fired for not taking good enough care of my mother's "beauty needs."

But I was there and dutifully applied her makeup and did her hair, holding a mirror to her face as she lay dying in her bed, waiting for her to tell me if I'd done well enough or if more lipstick was needed. More eye shadow perhaps.

"I'm sorry you never got my looks," she would tell me after admiring herself in the mirror for a while. "I don't know how that happened. When you were little, I harbored the hope that you might one day change from an ugly duckling into a swan. But, of course, that never happened. You poor girl. I can't imagine having led your life, with your plain face and dumpy body. It must have been torture for you, knowing how beautiful your mother was. You must have thought God had something against you to rob you of your rightful beauty." She sighed then, almost exhausted with her speech, but managed to continue after a moment. "I don't know. Maybe God does have something against you. I can't imagine a crueler fate, but at least you know it wasn't my fault."

I assured her that I knew.

"Please don't resent me though, dear. I did what I could to continue the cycle of beauty in the world. And right up until I'm in my casket, I'll be continuing it. All of our friends and acquaintances will marvel as I lie there, looking just as spectacular as when I had lived." She smiled at me then, and patted my hand.

"You'll see to that. Even in death I'll be the prettiest girl in the room, won't I?"

"Yes, Mother. Of course you will. I promise."

It wasn't long after that that she slipped away and I went down to the kitchen to fix myself something to eat. The fact that I had no intention of keeping the promise, of abiding by my mothers last dying wish, doesn't bother my conscience at all.

I've never felt happier or more alive, knowing that she's still up there, reeking and oozing and hideous, the stuff of nightmares rather than dreams. An ugly thing that finally matches the person she truly was.