Typhoid Mary

Heaving her guts always made Lily smile.

Aside from the abstract beauty of regurgitated meals and an excess of the fruity alcoholic beverages she prefered as they splattered on the drab sidewalk; she always felt better. It was as though a little of the sickness she had lived with for so long left her for a while. The fevered, slightly mad glaze in her blue eyes faded. Her hair didn’t hang so limply around her palid face, but sprang back into the lusterous golden curls her mother has so adored.

Mother.

Thoughts of her mother caused Lily to rock forward in another bought of nausea.

Typhoid Mary.

That’s what the children had called her, as well as the hospital men, the reporters and children’s services women. Those women who have pried her from her decomposing mother’s breast. So what if she had only been a small child? They looked at her with as much disgust as if she had plunged a knife into Lucretia Bainsbridge’s chest.

No one ever asked her what her name was. They just marked her down as “Mary” Bainsbridge. For years she’d had to respond to that wretched name. The hospice was a cold and far from comforting place to spend one’s last few weeks or months, even years. Though Lily displayed a few of the symptoms, occassionally even coming close to death, she didn’t pass on. For fourteen years she lived secluded in the hospice. The only people she ever spoke to were masked nurses and doctors who proded her with gloved hands and made impersonal small talk.

Her own personal hell, and handmaidens to boot.

By Kristen Nelson

Oldest of 2, product of an amicable divorce spawning odd abandomnet complexes, inferiority complexes and self harming OCD's, likely ADD. I'm amazed I get anything done at all. Frankly, I'm amazed I'm here at all.