Next of Kin
She is dead.
I know there are questions, but they have to wait. If I only say, “She killed herself,” you may get the wrong idea, dismiss her as another sad story. “Nothing could ever be that bad,” people always say, between bites of prime rib and garlic sautéed shrimp.
If I only tell you the events immediately preceding the aortic shot — that a tree frog jumped into her slippers as she sashayed around the parlor and the red-eye croaked while trying to escape, so she freaked and pissed herself, then excused herself with a curtsy— you’d want to scoff. Pity, you might say, ‘What horror for the guests!’ and raise your Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, a toast in her name.
In order to empathize, you must first know the whole story - that when she was twenty-something she was a crack whore and etiquette didn’t matter. She’d piss and shit herself anywhere; without discrimination, she gave cheap head to the wealthy and the downtrodden. Her malady is generally attributed to the socially graceless, but inescapable to the elite as well. No matter how you try to disguise it.
But Camille found true religion in the face of a little boy - nobody ever knew whose it was - discarded her life and gave him unrelenting love; together, they picked daisies and grew innocence. With a fresh canvas, she became an assistant to people of influence and status.
In her quest for an unblemished palette, she wed a lonely artist - after it was fashionable to exhibit a ‘lifestyle,’ yet before AIDS was so commonplace. Both had abandoned interest in sex and their distinctly separate longings became a macramé of complicity. Unconditional friendship. She tended his malady until the very last wheeze, fluffing pillows, reminding him of his inner beauty. He was kind to us both and left us affluent.
His headstone reads:
“So many hues.
Thanks, my Camille.”
I didn’t understand, until now. Her journal is quite astounding; left on the nightstand, its splattered pages smell of iron.
Forty-nine years ago Camille was born to adults who neglected the fact that life needs tending. Her childhood was discarded. She was sent to live with nuns who lauded devout words that resonated but emitted no warmth – they couldn’t explain where the ground had gone.
She transformed a dull acceptance into a vigil of things purely physical, where getting paid by strangers was far more gratifying than spreading her legs for the men of foster homes, the men she had trusted. Drugs helped her justify circumstance as someone else’s choice.
My mother simply became aware. She understood that flight is glorious, discovery of the ground - devastating. That summit diving breaks more than bones.
Her headstone will read,
“Our Chameleon,
Now Rest.”
I know it would have been more expedient to hear a tidy, compact explanation - that she killed herself because she was nutty or embarrassed. Lost. But there is more to it than that. There always is.
You should send daisies.
Shelly Rae Rich likes to make things up and mix them with truth. Her fiction is found in print and online publications including Apalachee Review, Duck and Herring's Pocket Field Guide, Opium Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, elimae, Ghoti, Juked, Ducts, Eyeshot, and VerbSap – and has been translated into two languages. Shelly co-edits the microfiction ezine, Tuesday Shorts. She lives in NYC, where she plans to finish that elusive novel-in-progress and her screenplay.