People Like Frank by Jenn Ashton

Author:Jenn Ashton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, fiction, inspirational, disability, autism, Alzheimer's, dystonia, dementia, Down's Syndrome
Publisher: Tidewater Press
Published: 2021-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Glass

Windows are for looking out of, not for looking into.” She remembered her mother repeating that line to her as they walked the streets in the early evening, when she made a remark about seeing families sitting down for supper together. She was fascinated with windows even then, the little vignettes behind the framed glass: a woman rocking a baby, a man and woman laughing and dancing, a child playing with a dog, an argument. They were the stories of life, but they were private and raw and her mother forbade her looking from that moment on. “You live your own life and they will live theirs, it’s not your place to be a spy,” she hissed with a smack atop her head. But she would still glance up when her mother’s back was turned. It was just too good a show not to bear witness.

She never used the silent movies she observed. She never spoke of what she saw behind the glass. She never wrote about them, not even in her private journals; she just let them soak into her and they came out in other ways: in a smile, in a frown, in a laugh, in the way she would eventually arrange the flowers in her garden.

In the middle of her living room floor, one knee in genuflection, her head bent low to the ground she cried into the phone that she held to her ear. The helpline girl (who sounded very young) carefully reflected back to her everything she said, until after a time Lina yelled, “Is this all you’re going to do? Repeat what I say?” and then she fell on her side and stuttered and felt even worse. “Can’t you offer me any real help?” she sobbed. She hung up, flung the phone across the room so hard it cracked and broke open against the wall, leaving two batteries rolling across the kitchen floor and under the fridge.

The call had somehow made things even more desperate and she cried her tired heart out over the batteries. Then she lay on the dank, cheap beige carpet, and when she looked in the mirror later, she saw the red mark imprinted across one side of her face. The house was a grand one, but living in its basement, with only three small windows, allowed little brightness and no views. Of course she understood that the basement had to be strong enough to hold what was on top of it, and so the luxury of light was not something built into the concept.

Upstairs, Harriet, her charge, was slowly sliding into dementia.

She had come to this new country as a language student, leaving behind a trail of sadness. But after a few months, all she had learned was that the school was corrupt and only legitimate on paper; and when that paper folded and the regulators closed it down, she found herself in desperate need of a legitimizing job so she would not be sent back. Which could not happen at any cost.

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