It was after long weeks of laborious work and study that Linnea found time to come live with her mother. It took two hours longer on the commute. The apartment was fully owned by them after she had decided against using her savings for her tuition debt, and had put them on the house instead.

Her mother was accustomed to living alone. It had been twenty years since the death of her husband, and her son, Linnea’s brother, was now probably in another city, or country. Dead or alive they didn’t know, but they knew not to bring him up.

Things were finally changing for Linnea, yet this newly discovered stability in her life didn’t come without a cost. The workload was ruthless on both the office and university ends. She didn’t have any advisors or professors she could talk to. She had friends, and there was also her mother, but her mother had only taken from her for very long now.

Between them there was the silent affection much like that of a nurse and a patient. Their conversations ran more like ellipses than full stops. There was always a concern on either end that wasn’t expressed. Much of the time, quite ironically, Linnea was taking for granted what she was doing for her mother, and what her mother felt for her. To Linnea it was more duty and less active and deliberate affection.

One night Linnea came home late due to a small party in her office for Easter. She had told her mother that she would be late already, but there was a small worry that crawled inside Linnea’s head, over her late night tv show, over the ham in the fridge, over the medicine she would take after dinner, and over her sleep.

She left the office and stood at a taxi stand. She didn’t have the energy to take the bus. Her time at home reading, watching something, eating, laying in her bed, thinking her thoughts, kept her healthier than the time she spent at parties or events talking to people. She was a bottomless well for the crowd, and it always drew from her. But still she gave in to it. She always believed she would be abandoned otherwise.

She came back twenty minutes shy of midnight, and all the little worries came culminated, gushing to her mind as she put the key into the lock. She hung her coat, lit the corridor, and gently pushed the door open to her mother’s room and found her asleep in her bed facing the curtain on the closed window. Linnea washed her face, brushed her teeth, and lay down to sleep herself.

She woke early. She had to attend a lecture. She repeated her morning routine alone and sleepy every morning. She ate a salad on yesterday’s plate with bread crumbs on it. The kitchen was the only place she couldn’t keep clean. She wondered about her mother since she hadn’t met her the night before, but the quiet she got then was the only quiet she allowed herself, and she had no intention to fill that up too.

Her voice was soft, and the clothes she wore hung low on her frail body. She used to call in sick very often but now she carried her medicine with her. The cloud of responsibilities that hung over her family’s head rained only on her.

There was an art class that took place once every two weeks that Linnea skipped lunch for. She had a great affinity for Rothko, and saw him everywhere she stared, blankly, infinitely; the wall, the fridge, her bed, the wash basin. It was only when she sat down to paint herself that she couldn’t imagine or feel him. She drew a curtains, with a center of indigo, blooming into a blend of purple and blue and expanding athwart into a red, that stretched to the ends of her canvas.

It was one. She hurried to her job. The work she did was mundane and undesirable. The money she got would be split and spent as soon as she got it. Today she was unusually uneasy, and felt the weight of her senses burdening her body. She would often eavesdrop on rumors or gossip, and see people walking out of the office in twos, in threes, and she felt she could then steal a glimpse of what her life would be otherwise.

As scattered as the days were that went by, she found solace at the station at night, where she waited for her bus back home. The soft jade that fell on her eyes affirmed Rothko, and showed her feelings in physical forms. Her being tired in that moment accentuated this very sensation, and reminded her that what she did was something real, something that would pay off.

The next day was the same. She saw the same faces, the same hurried glances met her eyes, the same train and the same bus, and the same small talk with a pregnant thirty year old woman. it was repetitive, and since she didn’t keep a journal she was never able to tell the days apart, or feel any different about them at any given time. Life was simply the same day repeating.

She took the taxi again at night. She had no shift at work that day. A taxi squeezed into the corner, she sat in it, and discovered it was the same black man who dropped her home on Easter as she told him where to go. At first they didn’t talk, but he initiated saying,

“You new here?”

“No.”, she replied. She sounded irritated, but she was quite okay to talk just then.

“I been drivin’ round the block here thirty years”, the driver said a little later, turning the radio off. “and back down south they pay me hefty, and I drive there five years at first, but I knew that wasn’t for me. I wanted somethin’ bigger than the old life.”

“Oh”, said Linnea, dismissively and blankly.

“You a studyin’ here?” He said, eyes on the road as if he hadn’t said it.

“Yes” replied Linnea. “How old are you?” she asked. Why she did not know.

“You guess. All of them’s good guessers til’ I ask them to guess my age.” he replied, right after which his phone started vibrating on the dashboard.

“Sorry madam.”, he said to her, putting the phone to his ear.

“Hello mama… It must be in the fridge… I told you not to call me at work… Heat one up for me too… Yes… Yes… I told him that… Okay mama… Goodnight.” And he put the phone back down.

“That was my mother. She had me when she was sixteen. Child marriage. she’s eighty now. She’s very active, though, she is. The doctor say she’ll live to a hundred.”

“You’re in your sixties?”, exclaimed Linnea with some astonishment.

“Yes madam. I ain’t been drivin’ round for nothin’ too. I’m saving to buy her a house.” And turning left into Linnea’s neighborhood, said, “Here is your place, madam.”

She paid him and trudged to the gate of her house, hanging lower than the coat she held in her hand. She opened the door, dropped her bags, and shook her shoes off. She walked in and saw a trickled line of light penetrating into the darkness of her mother’s room from the corridor. She pushed her mother’s door shut, and felt lighter, more relieved.

She walked a step further and smelt an odor forming at the back of her throat, and she closed her mouth and gulped it down but it turned worse after she did. She hurried to the kitchen with her nose shut between her fingers, opened the fridge, and scattering her gaze across its contents, looked at the browning ham, wrapped it in plastic, and put it away. She sprayed freshener all over, and found a dirty plate on the table. She felt angry at her mother for not washing it and not eating the ham. She figured she would scold her tomorrow. It was a Sunday.

Linnea woke up at noon, much later than usual. She felt well-rested. She was folding up her blanket when the odor from yesterday became more prominent than the freshener she sprayed around the house. It almost choked her, like an invisible smoke. She wrapped a piece of cloth around her nose and mouth and went to trace it. It led her to the door to her mother’s room.

Suddenly she stopped moving. She walked a single step forward on tiptoe and then shoved the door aside, as if it was a person in a crowd in her way. She reached for the bed, and pulling at her mother’s shoulder, first lightly, and then with all her force, turned her mother towards herself. Her still, colorless face was almost a mirror to the one she looked down into.