I would like to thank S.A. McKenzie for her short story submission “Happy Birthday”, a touching true story based on the events of the week when her mother passed away.
S.A. McKenzie lives at the bottom of the world on one of the better-looking islands of New Zealand, in the earthquake-ravaged ruins of the city of Christchurch. After surviving more than 12,000 aftershocks she has become adept at estimating the exact magnitude of any quake based on the amount of coffee spilled. She mostly writes offbeat and blackly humorous science fiction and fantasy stories featuring time travelling rabbits, carnivorous unicorns and man-eating subway trains. While she was once a stepmother, she is currently childless and between cats. Find her online at www.hedgehogcircus.com
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Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash
Happy Birthday
My mother lost consciousness for the last time in the early hours of the day of her seventy-first birthday. Perhaps the Filipino rest-home staff felt guilty at refusing to call a doctor for her during the night, because they loaded all her birthday cards, flowers and unopened presents into the ambulance alongside her like offerings to placate an angry spirit.
When I arrived at the ICU on the back of a nor’west gale I found them spilling off the tiny table next to her bed every time the sliding doors of the hospital slid apart. I sat with her and told her about the wind and how it had blown a caravan off the road. I’d passed the shattered remains on the bus on the way to my home town. Her eyelids fluttered and twitched but never opened. My father paced back and forth, calling the guests who’d been invited to her birthday lunch.
When she was moved to the ward upstairs I arranged everything in her room so that the first thing she would see when she woke was a line of colourful cards and flowers. And of course, the presents. Who would want to stay sleeping with all those beautifully wrapped parcels waiting to be opened? When I was done with that I stood by the rattling window and watched the wind fling black and white seagulls sideways and send plastic bags dancing over the roofs of the town.
She was stranded in those deep green depths somewhere between sleep and a coma, only stirring to moan in an oddly musical fashion whenever someone touched her, so we found ourselves deprived of even that consolation. After a couple of days it became clear that this was a dream from which she’d never wake. We bought her a little piece of land on the coast, under a row of flowering cherry trees. She’d always said she wanted a place with a view of the ocean.
“I’d better check it for size, I suppose,” my father said, and lowered himself slowly to lie on the grass as cherry blossom petals snowed down upon him. It was a good fit.
When the walls of the hospital grew too close, we walked around the town. On the wide shore not far from the hospital an elephant seal had beached. Lost, or sick, nobody knew. The vast beast gave birth on the bare sand, with only the fluttering tape erected by the local ranger to protect her from the curious eyes of beach goers and their dogs. We watched her from a distance, wind-blown sand stinging our faces. Mother and pup lay inert, exposed to the sun and the endless wind.
At night I lay awake in the room where my mother used to sleep, watching the porcelain faces of her collection of Pierrot dolls like a row of crescent moons in the glow from the flickering fairy lights she’d wound around the veranda outside. The scent of her perfume seeped in a soft cloud out of the overstuffed closets, filled with brand new clothes with the tags still on them from that last frenzied shopping trip before she could no longer drive.
The local paper reported that the elephant seal pup had died and the mother had gone back to the ocean. At night I pictured her there, graceful now in the green dark, but alone, childless. Finally out of reach of the incessant wind.
My father’s fondness for collecting electronic gadgets had me prowling the darkened house, trying to locate whichever blasted item was currently emitting electronic beeps and chirps. Increasingly deaf but resistant to getting a hearing aid, Dad was oblivious. He proudly showed me his latest acquisition, an ugly white lump of plastic purchased for a dollar from the Salvation Army shop. It displayed the time, date, day of the week and the current temperature.
On the fifth day my mother slipped away, quietly and without any fuss. We were on the highway when I got the call. Dad didn’t need to hear the words to know what had happened. He pulled over, unable to see through the tears. I stared out the window at a flock of sheep, dry-eyed and aching. They lined up at the fence and stared back.
The birthday flowers were wilted now. I arranged my mother’s birthday cards on the mantelpiece in the lounge together with the sympathy cards that had begun to arrive in the mail. The unopened presents seemed to silently reproach me, so I opened them and laid the gifts out with the cards. There was nothing extravagant there, just small pretty things intended to soften that sterile rest home room—an embroidered handkerchief, scented soap, a straw hat adorned with silk flowers.
We went shopping to feed all the relatives who would be flying in for the funeral. As I was unloading the groceries in the kitchen I heard a high-pitched jingle. I tracked it into the lounge. That one dollar lump of plastic from the Salvation Army shop was jauntily playing Happy Birthday. Those missing tears found me then, crumpled on the floor with the bags of groceries. My father came to the door and looked on in bewilderment as a song that he could not hear played on and on.
Thanks
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