Deathwish 023: Rachel


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For a delusional optimist, I spend a lot of time daydreaming about death. Every time I ride my bike, I think too hard about a car smashing into me. I picture it so intensely, that it makes that spot between my shoulder blades tingle and jolts me back to reality. In the daydream, I get scraped between two vehicles or slammed into a building—either way, I look like something from Ed Gein’s woodshed. There are so many bones sticking out of so many places. My body’s thrown head-first to the ground so that finally, luckily, another vehicle turns my head into a sticky mess of teeth, hair and blood.

At least I don’t have to worry about being trapped in my own body for the next five decades.

The catalyst for these thoughts is my mom, who died four years ago. I can’t go to Frank’s Noodle House because the scent is identical to Room 202 in the hospice unit when her organs began failing.

When I was about seven, my mom told me she never wanted to be a vegetable -- that we were supposed to yank the cord if her brain was uselessly continuing a game of keep-away between her body and death.

A few weeks after, I saw a woman trapped like this. She was a colorless, stringy woman in a wheelchair at the Piggly Wiggly.  Her eyes didn’t move and she had a line of drool that stretched from her lips to her lap. I was choking on purple juice from one of those little foil-lidded plastic containers shaped like a wooden barrel. My mom was not a vegetable, but she was in a body being systematically shut down by cancer, which ultimately saved her brain for last.

But we didn’t pull the plug.

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To read the previous installment, "Deathwish 022: Roni," go here. To participate in Deathwish, find details here.

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Rachel was born in Waubeka, Wisconsin and currently lives in Portland, OR.


Matty Byloos

Matty Byloos is Co-Publisher and a Contributing Editor for NAILED. He was born 7 days after his older twin brother, Kevin Byloos. He is the author of 2 books, including the novel in stories, ROPE ('14 SDP), and the collection of short stories, Don't Smell the Floss ('09 Write Bloody Books).

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