Page 97 - Vol. VI #1

responsibilities in a half-assed manner. Mrs. Harper chuckled meanly.
“Time to go inside,” Sheila said.
to lay on her belly, put her feet on the floor and grip the far side of the queen mattress while he entered her. She’d never had an orgasm this way, and was confident she wouldn’t tonight either, but she wanted him to be in a good mood. Sex was what kept him coming to her, she knew. He had confided in her that on the few occasions that his wife was willing to have sex, she just lay there, arms at her side, with a grimace on her face. Shei- la kept up a steady stream of dirty talk as Randall pounded into her. Her grip tightened on the bed cover, pulling it in big handfuls toward her face. It smelled like overly sweet fabric softener.
Mrs. Harper didn’t put up a fight. The movement into the wheelchair and the energy it took to sit up had drained her of any remaining energy store she had, and her head was lolling to one side as though even her neck was tired. She’d barely need the morphine to fall into dreamland tonight.
Sheila rolled her back up the ramp and into the house. She and Randall repeated their dance with Mrs. Harper in reverse, only relaxing when the old woman lay in the home-care hospital bed
When Randall was done, she pulled up her scrub pants and flopped onto the bed next to him, her hand on his chest.
she would die on, arms at her sides and breath- ing deeply from the exertion of movement. She shivered as Sheila covered her in a heap of com- forters and blankets. The covers weren’t enough, and Mrs. Harper went on shivering even as the morphine Sheila shot into her mouth sent her to sleep.
“You’re a fucking angel of death, you know that?”
Randall stood for a moment watching the old woman sleep. Sheila muted the television, watch- ing the talking heads on the early evening news move their mouths and smile. They stood like that for a while until Randall took her hand and pulled her to the front bedroom and onto the bed covered in a white chenille spread.
Sheila pulled her hand back and ran it through her hair, feeling the dampness at the roots from sweat. Randall sometimes got angry after sex. It was probably the only sign of a guilty conscience she ever saw.
He touched her hair, and she ran her fingers over the stubble on his cheek. Soon they were kissing and their hands were moving all over their bod- ies, their tongues going wild inside each other’s mouths. He pulled her onto the bed, which made an enormous squeak. Their arms and legs inter- twined, they panted like dogs who’d run a mile, the throw pillows falling to the wood floor with a soft thud.
“Oh no, you enjoy it, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes when you’re bending over my mother, giving her that morphine that eats at her brain. You’re killing her.”
They kissed and then he lunged forward and rubbed his face in between her breasts. She arched her back, and he worked her scrub pants and underwear down to her knees. He stood
He nodded and she went in the other room to grab her purse. She looked over at Mrs. Harper
to make sure the noise and movement wasn’t penetrating her morphine stupor. The woman lay perfectly still under the mound of blankets, her head thrown back and jaw slack.
up, and she did what she usually did, which was
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“It’s a job,” she said.
“I’m helping her make her transition,” she said. “Want some weed?”
She wished she had brought in the flask from the car. The Adderall was making her paranoid. Ran- dall wasn’t accusing her of anything. He was just moody, maybe joking.