Each morning, when she woke and realized she was still alive, she was disappointed.

Yet she wasn’t keen on dying. Or, at least, hadn’t the nerve for suicide. “Active euthanasia,” it would be called in Europe, or wherever they allowed that sort of thing. Especially taking into consideration her age and quality of life.

That was always the monkey wrench in life-versus-choice debates. Quality of life.

Quality had separated itself from her life gradually, like nail polish peeling at the cuticles and eating inward. She barely noticed it oxidizing. Years of imperceptible shifts—a knee that ached when it rained, a chest that tightened in the night—and then suddenly, one morning, quality was gone.

That was the beginning of her disappointment, and also of her resignation to the slow and dimming march into ineffectuality.

Friends and house plants died one by one and weren’t replaced. China cracked and wasn’t repaired. Plumbing failed, and she simply moved business to the other bathroom. Her vision faded, and she didn’t visit the optometrist.

This morning, her disappointment was mingled with something else. She had to ponder a while to recognize it after so many years of atrophied analysis.

It was… It was…

“Revulsion.” She spoke the word aloud, because it was perfect. It was an exact description, precise and pointed and perfect, with grotesque pleasure in it.

She took stock. Dry, untrimmed nails with deep ridges running lengthwise. Legs and armpits with infrequent but coarse and curling hairs sprouting from spotted flesh. Eyebrows absolved of pigment and spreading in wiry disarray across her brow. Hair hanging flat and colorless around a collapsed face. Under-eye circles weighted with a double portion of gravity. A severely curving spine. Legs so shapeless they wouldn’t hold up socks anymore.

“Disgusting,” she rasped.

She had lost her landmarks to a world of decay. No love to make, no birth to give, no graduations to attend, no weddings to plan. No connections of any kind anymore, and she had simply stopped.

But time had not stopped. She had been bypassed, and, realizing it, hated everything.

She recognized hate. It festered, like a bedsore or an abscessed molar, until it pressed from every side on every sense.
She stood.

A shower. That’s what she would do. Take a shower. A thorough one. She would wash—and condition—her hair. Scrub everything. Shave.

But she had no conditioner, and her razor had long since rusted away.

“Fine,” she muttered, trudging to the kitchen. From the refrigerator she drew a half-bottle of olive oil. Back in the lime-stained bathroom, she rummaged through a drawer of spilled Q-tips and leaking vats of vapor rub until she found a torn package of pink-handled razors.

From a forlorn laundry basket in the hallway she pulled a fraying washcloth and what had once been a beach towel. Though privacy was the one thing she had in spades, she closed the bathroom door. It was what living people did.

Standing before the bathtub, she shed the ragged nightgown and robe she’d fallen asleep in last night. She lifted one foot, defiantly noting the knotted toes, over the tub’s high, then clutched the molding shower curtain for balance and dragged the other in after it.

A shock of cold water sprang from the showerhead. She gasped, groped in blind rage for the knob and cranked it left.

Scalding water cascaded over her shoulders and chest, turning the gray, purple-veined flesh bright red—the brightest color in the room.

She reached again for the knob, but finally let her hand drop.

Pain was feeling. Feeling was delicious.

She emptied an encrusted bottle of shampoo, then the olive oil, onto her head. The steam turned mixing scents to a medicinal vapor.

The razor’s first unpracticed stroke cut her knee. Blood dripped in a thin line down her leg and swirled pink in the drainoff at her lobster-colored feet.

She was fascinated by the sight of blood in water, which she hadn’t seen since menopause. Even so, she softened her papery knees and shins with the last drippings of olive oil.

The disposable blade turned a bristly surface to silk, and she felt a surprising rush of pleasure. Even after the hot water ran out and turned lukewarm, she ran her fingertips over her thighs in obscure homage to a more sensual time.

She patted herself dry almost affectionately, observing the flaming tone of her skin, the bulge of veins, the heady chill of a draft from under the door. The opaque steam began to stifle.

She wished it were autumn for the invigoration of dry fresh air, then realized she didn’t know what season it was at all. Perhaps it was autumn.

As she reached for the door, a shiver passed through her cooling body. What world might she discover beyond the bathroom door? Would releasing the steam into the hallway break or extend the spell of smooth legs?

Threadbare beach towel draped about her like a toga, hair dripping flat but fresh and turning cold, she floated through the nest she inhabited.

She had never seen it. Not this way, as from an objective distance.

Everything—everything was faded. Colorless to the point of translucence, years deteriorating into dusty oblivion.

Dishes rusting in the kitchen sink. A used coffee filter growing mold where it had been forgotten. Peanut butter glued to a knife’s dull blade. A stiff dishrag on the table, a hand towel hanging off the counter.

A radio she could remember neither turning on nor ever listening to buzzed a grating static in the living room.

The living room.

Magazines in an untidy corner pile dated back decades and dropped off fifteen years ago. Depressions in the carpet showed the limited path trudged for years without variation—packed carpet spokes around a rocking chair hub.

She sat down, swathed in the towel and slumped in the rocking chair, and wept.

Kate Simmons grew up in Centerville, Iowa, then earned a bachelor's degree in communication in Lincoln, Nebraska. Since then she has moved to Minneapolis, where she now resides with her husband, Nathaniel Salzman, and their dogs, Henry and Lucy. She teaches a creative writing course with community education in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and has plans for several more works of fiction.