Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In my memory she’s always there at the edge of things, sipping half cups of coffee, shuffling about in slippers: a small, ill-defined woman, face closed like a fist about-what? Pain? Her disaffection and disappointment with life, I suppose. Only in photographs, old photographs, did I ever see her smile. I don’t know what made her go on. She had no passions that I know of. There was nothing she loved, nothing was ever as it should be, nothing was good enough. As years went on she faded ever further from life, her days held together by meager threads of routine. I recognize so much of her in myself, so much of myself in her.