The air around him had gone stale. His breath was hot, the taste was fetid, and he struggled to suck whatever fresh air was left in the room. He couldn't help but imagine that, somehow, death had seeped into his room. No, it was impossible, bodies don’t decay that fast. It couldn’t have been more than eight, ten minutes since he removed the plugs from their sockets and watched the ever-vigilant lights of the life-support system dim and fade. And then maybe another minute or two before her lungs could no longer recycle their oxygen and her brain suffocates, the cells dying one by one like trees in a forest fire. After the brain he didn’t know what would be the next to go. The liver? The outer extremities? Regardless, it must have been no more than six minutes ago that he was sure his grandmother was dead.
Now he sat on the bed of his own room, a sweat breaking across his forehead. When he was three years old she had lost her speech, at five she’d become a vegetable, and when his parents had gone they were marooned together. For the next fifteen years he’d been imprisoned by her mute warden, shackled to her whirring machines and her colostomy bag, commanded by a master who’d never spoken. Now that she’s gone, he’s been granted freedom, his own life. But the ember hatred for her smoldered still, and even after having completed his Kevorkian task he felt no sense of absolution. Maybe it was not death that crept its way from across the hall and choked the air around him. Maybe it was something else.
boy in bedroom, late afternoon/early evening, faint blue-purple lighting coming from window, front lit by dim flourescent bulb (cool). sitting hunched over on the corner of the bed, wearing singlet, expression is inner sadness/guilt outer expression is slightly overwhelmed, exasperated, nervous, -deep breaths-
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