Spoiler! :
Please enjoy and give me some feedback. ALSO! I hate the name of this story. If anyone has an idea to share, please enlighten me. -__-' Oh, and you should've seen this document on my computer as edited in Word. Heh, so many slash-throughs and three different colors of font in an attempt to edit and organize. It's quite pretty, actually. 
*edit: a few last minute revisions made after Truth's helpful review. (See below.)
Prologue:
A Lesson in Numerical Value
A Lesson in Numerical Value
I learned how to count in a nursing home. First backwards, then forwards. Sitting idly in the home's sunroom among the wrinkled and gray patients slumbering in their chairs, I would watch the numbers above their heads. The white, rectangular cards decorated in black, bold-faced print would flip down from the empty air over their balding scalps, periodically subtracting days or miraculously adding them. To the right of the ever swishing number cards, a longer card reading "DAYS" hung suspended until the old men and women's time had dropped to "MINUTES".
My mother had worked in St. Mary's Home for the Elderly Resting Center in New York City's lower east side, taking tender care over her dying, graying patients in their final months, days, hours. She was an angel of healing-- bright, beautiful and kind. When I was a little over four years old, she had decided neither of us were ready for me to be sent off to pre-school at the neighborhood church, so she compensated by taking me with her to work. Deep down, in my insecure little heart, I always felt strangely guilty and burdensome, though I was her only child and I had never caused much of a problem.
Though her coworkers adored me, and she delighted in showing off her precious son to her fawning patients, I had felt like I was constantly in her way, an incautious cat sneaking slyly underfoot, only to trip its master in an attempt at affection and closeness. This anxiety, this caution made me shy but attentive, obedient but awkward.
Being my mother and knowing my moods, when asked by fellow employees about my abnormally quiet and reclusive demeanor, she had simply deemed me as thoughtful, an old soul inside a young body.
I suppose she was right, in a way, despite how expectedly biased her description for me might have been. I was thoughtful--I still am. My focus was constantly trained inside my own skull, for not a lot of things made sense to me, unsurprising considering how young I had been. I hadn't understood why the death of St. Mary's patients was so surprising at times, or how no one behaved strangely around the elderly whose numbers were dropping ever closer to 0, or why my mother and the other nurses insisted upon wearing makeup to work when most of the people she would be seeing were half-blind anyways. I had attributed these oddities to everyone else being adults and therefore enigmas.
My first memories were of the gray countertop of the front desk, of the too bright overhead lighting that gave everyone a sickly pallor, of the scent of bleach and nut bread and baby powder that all combined to form one atmospheric smell--the scent of old people. The memories were never characteristically pleasant, nor were they traumatizing. They managed to float somewhere in the middle ground, dull without being torturous.
The only reasons I never put up a fuss when my mom roused me from sleep early on the weekday mornings as she was curling her hair or applying red lipstick were the prospect of listening to the old tell their life's stories and observing the switching of the cards.
When we would enter the doors of the nursing home, either fully bundled in itchy, winter attire or outfitted in relaxed, warm weather cottons depending upon what point in my past I'm recalling, I snuck off around the front desk, down the central hall and into the sunroom. My mother knew I was still in the building, not getting into trouble and behaving oddly un-childlike, so she never worried when I disappeared in the mornings. She would clock in, retrieve her daily assignments, room numbers and such, and go about her job with the most delicate of grace, a smile on her red painted lips.
Inside the sunroom, where the elderly were situated in their chairs, wrapped in blankets and drooling and snoring in their sleep, I would curl up on the worn carpet and watch. The sagging of their pale, fleshy faces, the fluttering of eyelids, the gaping mouths and the steady rise and fall of fragile breasts. Someone's feet would twitch inside their stockings or someone would choke on saliva, stutter, then return to semi-motionless slumber.
But their rest was never entirely peaceful. Always floating above their balding scalps, the number cards would flip down: ten, nine, eight...
At the nursing home, I learned how to count. Backwards first, then forwards.
The cards--small, rectangular and white with black, bold-faced numbers--would swish and click as they fell into place, smaller numbers replacing their greater-valued predecessors. To the right of the row of cards--the number of digits varying depending on the quantity of place values--a longer card reading "DAYS" hung, motionless beside its ever moving companions. I would watch the cards for hours, learning that two comes before three, three before four, four before five, and so on. It was as much entertainment as a child in a nursing home could ask for.
On days when it was too chilly to be in the sunroom, I would park beside the bed of a patient inside his room, listening to the gravely or whispery voice of the ancient being as he related his life's stories to me. I learned more than numbers at St. Mary's. I learned about the wars, about money and love and people on the opposite side of the planet. It was difficult to wrap my naive mind around the macrocosm of the adult world at times, but more than anything I enjoyed hearing the elderly speak.
The rooms were always the same pale beige, the beds dressed in pale pinks and white, glasses of water on bedside tables, liver-spotted hands curled around the edges of sheets. All my early memories resembled each other. There was little variation in the routine, little change of scenery or color.
As more time passed, and I emerged somewhat from my fragile shell, I thought less about my mother and the employees and more about the patients, growing to appreciate as much as a self-absorbed child could the delicate intricacies of life.
I had witnessed miracles in numbers. The passing of lives counted above their heads like the tally marks of God; the extra, invaluable time added on to the remaining days.
One woman--a particularly sweet old lady with a cloud of fluffy white hair that reminded me of candy-floss at the carnival and seemed light enough to float up off her scalp in a breeze--was marked with ten days remaining. I overheard her telling a nurse her grandson was getting married in two weeks. She was overjoyed, for she loved the girl and thought they would be a handsome couple, but she was afraid she would be unable to attend the wedding ceremony due to her poor health. She was more correct than she could have imagined.
But low and behold, just as the guilt at my knowledge of her impending death was beginning to weigh on me like a sack of flour tossed onto my bony back, the numbers above her head flipped rapidly with a sound like flapping pigeon wings. From "1 0 DAYS" to "3 2 DAYS" the cards then read.
She had told the nurses the wedding was beautiful.
I had been only a child when this all happened: experiencing death alongside the dying. It was a heavy burden to bear, but I figured--even at so young an age--if someone had to do it, it might as well have been me. I had been incredibly selfless that way.
***
My mom had worked five days out of the week and I accompanied her when I was not attending my half-day's worth of public education three out of those five days. That had been life for me. Not much happened in my early years. At least nothing worth detailed recollection.
Until I told her about the number cards.
I remember the day clearly and with no little amount of regret. I still dream about that night sometimes, even here, miles away from the home in which I had grown up, reliving the moment I gained a limited understanding that what I could do, what I could see, was not common or accepted or something I should ever share with anyone. That evening shaped my life, and I can't still decide if it was for the better.
My mother and I had been walking home one evening, the sun was beginning its descent behind the treetops, silhouetting the arching trees and elongating the shadows, and the weather was pleasant and warm, for it was late summer. I held her hand and watched my feet; I was a clumsy little kid. I could smell her perfume mingle with the heady scents of summer--roses, freshly cut grass, sweat. Her manufactured scent was a comforting smell, one that whenever I would catch a whiff later in my life, I was sent reeling back into my childhood, headfirst. Chanel No. 5, I'd eventually note. She had always worn it.
Her wavy, yellow hair caught the setting sun, and her warm, open face was framed by a halo of red and yellow light. I stole glances at her, looking back at the cracked concrete under my shoes so I wouldn't trip.
"So, how was your day, Phonsie?" she asked me, addressing me by the nickname I usually frowned upon seeing as I was no baby but a growing boy of six years. But I was in a very good mood, so I said nothing.
Normally, I would have replied with a vaguely satisfying answer, then ask her of her own day, being much more interested in her wellbeing than my own. But today was different. I had something truly important on my mind. Interesting. The number cards had seemed even more present than usual, more real, and I was beginning to wonder, Does everyone else see them, too?
I had to ask.
And then I did asked, and when the words left my mouth, Do you know when people are going to die? she had just looked at me strangely, her brown eyes too dark.
She batted her eyelashes in confusion, then put on her best motherly-concern expression before asking me to elaborate.
"Do you see cards," I began, trying to be more precise in what I was asking, but her expression instilled an unfamiliar anxiety inside my small chest, and I felt very unsure of whether or not I should be talking about this. "Over people's heads," I finished in a tiny voice, and I worried my lip between my baby teeth.
My mother blinked once, the dark look passed, and she pressed her lips into a tense line. Grabbing my hand into hers, she started walking a little faster, a little too fast for my taste, and I suddenly felt like a sideshow attraction or a fish out of water or a Communist. I knew then, in a brilliant moment of clarity, not everyone saw the cards with the numbers. Actually, I was almost certain in that moment of clarity that no one saw the cards. Mother did not approach the subject at the dinner table that evening, and I certainly didn't. It was better for us to remain silent and eat our green beans and pretend that nothing had changed and that I wasn't some freak having hallucinations. I had cleared my plate of my dinner, knowing it was expected and polite to do so, but I don't remember ever tasting the food. Bitterness had seemed to numb my tongue.
The cards never left, though, no matter how little charm they held for me now that my pristine little world of wonder had been shattered by doubt and dread. Slowly, I developed the ability to all but erase their visibility from my line of sight, just ghostly traces of black numbers floating in my peripheral vision. I was fine without the numbers, I figured. I could count very well by that point, and school would be starting, and I would make great friends that didn't see things, so I could safely hide behind their normalcy. But first grade passed, and the elderly passed, and time passed, too. Before long, there were just some cards that not even I, Alphonse Harper of the Magical Ignore-It-And-It-Isn't-There Ability, could ignore.
My mother's cards.
No miracle would save her like the one that saved the old woman with the cloud of white, candy-floss hair. She'd witness no wedding of mine or my of grandkids' and be able to tell the nurse how beautiful it all was. She wouldn't grow gray and she wouldn't whisper stories of her half-forgotten and half-imagined youth. She wouldn't ever really know how much I loved her nor how much I wanted her to understand what I saw hanging above her head like the suspended blade of a guillotine.
She wouldn't live to bake me a cake for my eighth birthday.
Gender:
Points: 240
Reviews: 33