#77 Incarnate

by Dino Parenti

Maddie’s creating again. I can tell by her bloody fingers.

She’s hunched at the table, burled scapulae hooking over the swale of a spine. With the dementia onset came the hand tremors, but she wouldn’t quit her taxidermy. And now she keeps lancing her fingers with those scythe-like spikes she uses for needles.

“Wait till you see Wolfie,” she yodels between trilling whistles. “Minerva, you’re gonna flip!”

I’d nod if I were so inclined. Ditto calling her mom, my sip-and-puff wand notwithstanding. Maddie had forfeited that right some time back; I was fighting leukemia, and she kept doling out unheeded advice and squinting judgment as if deriding the sun’s very efficacy.

“All self-calamity,” she’d say, “metastasizes from audacity.”

Now she whistles and over-coddles.

Wolfie. The Chihuahua rescue I’d adopted as buffer after agreeing to move back in once Maddie’s mind began to decay. A snappy, surly, dirty-blonde hellion, just like her.

This past Thanksgiving, upon announcing that I was donating to cancer the tresses I’d spent a dozen years growing out, those eyelids—scabrous from life-long wrangling—constricted anew at my show of nerve and sovereignty as Wolfie snarled at me from her lap.

Six months ago, after Wolfie and I got run over, it was his death, not my quadriplegia, that almost broke her.

Now listen to Maddie, warbling contentment, basking in her checkered-tile parlor of controlled docility and petrified beasts, plunging-and-pulling individual hairs into a forever play-bowed Wolfie, replacing his unruly flaxen pelt hair-by-hair with my auburn strands.