STORIES: Mrs. Farley’s Mind

Mrs. Farley caught the tip of shadow in the corner of her eye.  It disappeared before she had the key completely turned in the lock of her kitchen door.  She took a deep breath and let it out as a small sigh, glad it had gone, glad it didn’t want to come inside tonight.

Sometimes, she didn’t mind it, didn’t worry about its need to follow her around her day.  She didn’t like it at all at first, it frightened her, showing up one evening as she came home from her Thursday night bridge club.  For a while, she only noticed it at night and that’s why perhaps it scared her.  The second time she saw it, about a week later, she told her son.

Jeffrey and his clingy marshmallow wife were most concerned at first.  But after a while it seemed that he grew more annoyed and the marshmallow quite bored after the initial fear and worry.  He’d installed an alarm system in the house, "You should have one since Dad’s not here," he’d said.  One time, when the shadow lingered and tried to slip inside the house, she’d slammed the door and breathless, called Jeffrey right away. 

"Mom, it’s just that you’re lonely now with Dad gone.  It’s only been six months.  It’s normal, so they say, to see him, or things, or shadows even where they’re not."  He hadn’t come, but called her in the morning.

Sometimes, when it came in the early morning or mid-afternoon, she saw it as a movement, a flash or an awareness just of something that was there.  No matter how quickly she turned her head, it was always gone.  Mrs. Farley got used to it eventually, after all, it never harmed her.  And too, she learned that how you teach your children haunts you even more. 

"Maybe you shouldn’t be living alone, Mother," the marshmallow had said.  Knowing this was not an invitation but a threat, Mrs. Farley learned to keep the thing’s visits to herself. She’d learned, as they did, that this veiled concern meant Willow Manor, where Mrs. Farley’s own father had had to be the last few years of his life, and only then because he was incontinent, preferred the velvet sofa in the living room, and didn’t know who she was or how to eat.