Three Times Dead

by Mark Lazer

Mrs. Jenkins says her life is like the bar code on a milk carton of milk that has expired, and now the scanning device of the supermarket doesn't recognize the bar code's product as milk anymore.

Mrs. Jenkins says that products that passed the expiration date, but still lie around in the supermarket, you can take them home for free. She says, "Almost all products can be eaten at least a week after the date it says on the package."

She also says that she doesn't really mind the smell of sour milk in her fridge any longer.

"When you've had more treatments of chemotherapy than you care to remember, your sense of taste is reduced to less than zero," says Mrs. Jenkins. She says, "After chemotherapy you taste the same sourness you have in your nose after you threw up, and you feel so ill that you want to throw up more all the time." She says that she doesn't have enough fingers to make her puke as much as she wants to.

"After chemotherapy," she says, "you're literally sick of life."

Mrs. Jenkins says, "If you're my age and you need chemotherapy to keep living, you're better off dead."

She says, "If you're about to die, you ask yourself, what's the point of cleaning the tiles of the bathroom once more?"

Mrs. Jenkins doesn't buy new stuff anymore. Even worse, she started selling all the things she owns. She says, "I sold my television. I'm not going to waste my last living days away watching commercials for shit I'm not going to buy anyway."

Mrs. Jenkins says that you only realize how great it is to breathe through your nose once you caught a cold. She says, "At my age you're not really aware of your breasts anymore until they cut them off."

Mrs. Jenkins says that if she's about to die there's no reason why she shouldn't smoke and when she lights a cigarette she smiles, and says how ironic it is that smoking kills all cells, except cancer cells.

"It's also ironic," she says, "that after chemotherapy when you lost all the hair on your head, the chance of skin cancer rises because the exposed skin that the UV-rays can target, has increased."

"More irony," she says. "The hospital guaranteed me that I was cured from cancer after that never-ending series of chemotherapy treatments."

Later, when the doctor showed the x-rays of her head, it revealed a tumor the size of an adult's fist. He called this new cancer lump an agent. Mrs. Jenkins called it a fucking tumor bigger than her own fucking hand. She said, "It fucking looks like it's flipping the finger!" The doctor said he understood Mrs. Jenkins' reaction.

When we walk back to her house, Mrs. Jenkins says that she had expected me to laugh when she said her tumor flipped the finger.

I say, "It didn't look like that at all."

She says that it was a good joke anyway.

I say, "I heard better."

She says, "Two tumors walk into a bar..."

Mrs. Jenkins wants to stay alive to celebrate her birthday one more time. She only needs to survive the dark depressing winter days, after that it's easy. All downhill.

She's going to buy a cake that wouldn't have expired yet. An enormous cake with cream and chocolates and icing and candles. She's going to pretend she hasn't lost her sense of taste and then she's going to force me to eat too much until I would feel ill, and then she gives me another piece, and another one. She's going to keep feeding me pieces of cake until I'm going to throw up. Then she's going to say that it is exactly the way she feels all the time. And we're going to laugh all day until my stomach hurts of eating too much cake and of the laughing.

But Mrs. Jenkins, she died today. Three days before her birthday. Three days too early.

* * *

Today I bought the biggest cake I could find in the supermarket. It had cream and chocolates and icing. I put in fifty-nine candles and lit them all, then blew them out right after. Then I ate the whole cake, and soon, when I felt sick, I threw up all over the place.

I said, "Now that’s how I feel all the time."

We didn't laugh at all.

© Mark Lazer 2006

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Mark Lazer was born in The Netherlands and lived most of his life there pretending to like it. He claims he never killed a man or resided in a mental hospital. At the moment, he is working on his debut novel entitled Madman, which is supposed to be finished somewhere in 2007.