Happy Hump Day: Alas, the Edition

My mother's house is currently a crime scene.

And while I would love to turn that opening into a trompe l'oeil of words--just kidding! a theoretical crime scene! all the world a metaphor!--alas, I cannot. (Alas is something you get to say when your mother's house is a crime scene.) No, there is actual yellow police tape cordoning off my mother's living room, which is kind of ironic considering someone died in there. Get it? Living room? Alas, again, alas. I am not cut out for this type of tragedy, a church giggler had I ever gone to church, the girl in the movie theater who turns to her friend to ask if she, too, saw the goof, blood on the car windshield seconds before the blast.

Nothing is real.

I did not know the woman. She was a caregiver of Allen's, a woman provided by the county. She was slightly broken, strange, and so she had been living upstairs. (Allen likes to collect strange broken people, pretty leaves, in the last three years he has given me four hand mixers that he found discarded on the side of the street and yet still I buy cookie dough in tubes). Maybe I met this woman, I don't know--the caregivers, they come and go so quickly, most of them somehow damaged or Fijian and large, never damaged Fijians or damaged large people, just damaged people and then other people who just so happen to be from Fiji and thus rather large. What I do know is that this woman was found lying on the floor with her head in a bucket. What I do know is that she was dead, is dead, the verb tense a little tricky, although no one knows how or why or exactly when she died, the who and the where the only bright spots in the case. (Scant whisperings that she had been stealing prescription drugs, a prison record, Medicare not well known for vetting or caring, the living room now taped off yellow until the official autopsy report.)

And that is all I have to say about that, its notability not so much in the grim details of a story as in the lack of one. It is Wednesday and my mother's house is a crime scene. These things happen. Or they do not, the world cleanly divided, it would seem, between those people who tell these stories and those that live them. Get it? Live? Alas, poor Yorick! All morning I have listened to the gutteral hack of my neighbor coughing, my other neighbor playing Mozart on the piano. It is my intention to stay on the side of the teller.

And if that wasn't Hump Day enough for you, I give you this: Absurd, I'm telling you. The world is full of it.

I could not make this shit up if I tried.
xoxo,
Susannah