Your Mother’s Speech-to-Text Instructions for Visiting Nana
by Parker M. O'Neill
Listen I'm making soup right now so I'll be quick if you’re really hellbent on visiting Nana you should know there's Mold all through her house water damage hairy black fungus on the walls. If you really insist on flying down there then at least please don't go into her Mold room this goddamn phone never understands me. More typos and random capitalization than anything else and never a comma to spare. Her old room I said not Mold room the one your brother stayed in when he ran down there for a summer and abandoned us.
You'll want to stay in the guest room. It’s less filthy if such a thing can be said. The bugs are active at night the Paul Meadows fucking phone I said palmettos and they're just Florida cockroaches anyway. With better PR. People just want to call them something else and change them into something new.
Nighttime’s when they go on pilgrimage and swarm through the house in thick winding ropes the same way all the cousins will when Nana dies and all her antiques are up for grabs like that roadshow is in town. So the bugs though something in the Mold room is attracting them something rotting and damp and more succulent than that gator corpse in the muddy pool out back.
She screamed at me on the phone earlier she'd been drinking I suspect. As usual. Called me the wrong name and I could practically smell the brandy through the line. Just like when she was raising me and I haven’t forgot it. I told her to call a Mold specialist for Christ’s sakes she acted like I stabbed her. God forbid I don't want my kid breathing in some mystery spores. She’s still got that stubbornness I think it skipped a generation. Still stays up late into the night. Praying in that Mold room to what I do not know. To something.
You know what I think growing up with her as my mom Molded me. Made me the way I am. And I Molded you and your brother in turn. It wasn’t easy being her kid and it’s less easy now as she's changing you know in a transitory stage of life getting older. Like how a cockroach becomes a Paul Meadow when it crosses the Florida state line. You know how some old people can be you know how they are some old people some Mold people some Mold people
Parker M. O'Neill receives messages like this a couple times a week. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, and elsewhere. Find his work at parkermoneill.com.
