Like Snow Falling In Summer

TEA AND SHORTBREAD

An exert from a short, and not so sweet, murder story

I once would have said that murder is murder, whatever the circumstances. However, the law states that there are different degrees of murder, and after everything that has happened I have to agree. Who decides when murder becomes justifiable homicide, or even euthanasia?

This afternoon I’ll be leaving here for good, but there’s something I have to do first. The piece of paper, where Rob had scrawled his address, is carefully folded in my pocket. When I get back I’ll be checking out of the motel, handing over my door key for the last time. While I wait for the taxi to arrive, I look around the room I have called home for the last few months.

My suitcases are packed and standing at the bottom of the bed. The room is small and sparsely furnished. The motel manager’s wife cleans it every second day and I am grateful for the lack of clutter and most of all for the absence of dust.

There was dust everywhere in the grandmother’s house, even in the cracks on her face. She would sit up in bed, her shoulders hunched inside her pink nylon bed-jacket, when she powdered her cheeks.

‘It keeps me cool,’ she’d say if she caught me watching her, but I knew it was vanity.

The silver-framed hand mirror would tremble in her grasp as she stroked on bright lipstick, following an imaginary outline that bore no resemblance to the actual shape of her mouth and blotting with a lace-edged handkerchief. When I took her a cup of tea and some of my freshly made shortbread sprinkled with icing sugar, she would pull her overdone lips into a smudged smile. When I forgot that she didn’t take sugar in her tea, or sprinkled salt on her lunch instead of giving her the salt cellar, she would pout at me with a squashed cherry mouth. The lipstick looked like dribbled juice in the puckered lines around her lips. She left red lip prints on the chipped china cups and when I washed her dishes I’d think, there really isn’t any point in buying a new tea set when you’re about to die.........