Excerpt from today's work

How did it go wrong for you? She sometimes asked in her mind as she looked into those pale, hate-filled eyes. It seemed to her that there was a knot in him that every experience only drew tighter. Can the soul form a knot? And if it can, what can untie such a thing, how can it ever come loose? She wished she knew more about these things. She’d offered to move his bed into the sun room so he could look out over the garden. At least then he could watch the birds disporting in the bird-bath, see the wind move through the trees. He might live long enough to watch the jonquils spring up again. She imagined that when you are dying the beauty of such things would be focussed like sun through a magnifying glass. Perhaps the bright spot it made in your heart would sear, but who would not welcome a burn like that? Surely we all long to be purified, and with nothing more to come, no more errors or losses or compromises, the spring garden could have the last word, the final say on it all. Wouldn’t anyone want that? Well, not Jack. He refused to be moved and when she tried to ‘jolly him along’, taking him by the arm he actually struck out at her as if she were trying to lure him into some form of involuntary euthanasia. So he stayed in his dark, musty room with its mouldy walls and its sweet stink of cancer. Go ahead, she thought, eat up your own misery. Knock yourself out. She sat on the side of his bed and tried to get a few spoonfuls of pureed vegetables into his mouth, but he was like an infant, with the added faculty of cunning. After long exhortations, he finally opened his mouth for the spoon then spat the stuff out in a spray all down his front, knowing she would have to find and wipe up every spot. She could have cried. She could have killed him. How ironic that would be.