The dusty lampshade around the bulb cast more shadow than light, and her mother’s deathbed lay in semi-darkness. She glanced over at the neighbor. Old Mrs. Ryan nodded her agreement, so Joanne flung the curtains open. The pigeons that had congregated outside the window left in a flutter, and the pewter-grey light of the October afternoon crept into the bedroom. Her mother’s face was colorless, but the middle of her forehead was slick with the oil smeared there by Father Sullivan’s fat thumb. The jaw was slack and lopsided. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and Joanne nodded back at Mrs. Ryan—they would deal with the dentures later.
She took a white pillowcase from the bottom drawer of the dressing table and covered the mirror. An uncovered mirror could confuse the soul of the dead woman and delay its departure, and while Joanne didn’t put much store in those old superstitions, she didn’t want her mother’s soul hanging around for any longer than necessary. From the closet she took a burgundy Sunday dress and held it up to the window for a brief inspection. It would do. Mrs. Ryan took the dress from her and held it taut while Joanne used the shears to cut the back in a straight line, from hem to neck. It was thin and well-worn, and it yielded easily. She removed the rosary beads that Father Sullivan had placed in the bony hands and then, standing at each side of the bed, the two women laid the dress over the white nightgown and together worked the sleeves up the thin arms, massaging the elbows to straighten them, then tucking the material underneath on each side. They put the hands together again in prayer, and Mrs. Ryan bound the wrists and fingers with the beads.
Joanne looked around the room. The image of the Sacred Heart was still in its place, next to the door that Father Sullivan had closed firmly behind him a few moments ago. There was a solitary photo left on the wall, her parents on their wedding day, Margaret and James O’Malley frozen-smiled in an off-white frame. The wallpaper with the rambling roses was unchanged, though badly faded, and the grey outlines of the photographs that had been removed were still visible, ghostly windows to a distant past. This had once been her home.
There were neat piles of coins on the dressing table, and they reminded Joanne of counting coins with her mother in the Easter charity campaigns of her childhood. The priest would come to the school to demand that the girls make a sacrifice for the poor children of the world, deprive themselves of some luxury and put the savings in the special coin box that the church provided. Every Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty days of Lent leading to Easter, her mother would place the little cardboard box in the center of the kitchen table. Each year’s box had a different illustration. That first Lent after her father died the picture on the box was of a thin girl looking out from behind a barbed wire fence, and underneath in large black letters were the words What will become of this child? The thin girl’s sad eyes would meet Joanne’s as she ate her dinner. Joanne felt that they understood each other, she from the townland of Ballinrea and the hungry girl from the other side of the world, that they shared a mysterious intimacy.
Her mother decided that Joanne would sacrifice her school lunch for Lent. It would be good for Joanne, she said, as she was putting on too much weight anyway, and it would also set a fine example for the other girls in her class.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” her mother said, “for they will be filled.” But as the days went by, Joanne wasn’t filled. Her stomach gurgled and she felt weak at lunchtime watching the girls in her class eating their sandwiches and crisps. It was worse on the day when Samantha O’Casey came back from Dignam’s in the town with a brown paper bag of greasy sausage rolls, smacking her lips with such obvious pleasure that Joanne didn’t dare ask her for a bite. The next day she went with Samantha to Dignam’s and bought herself a bag of chips with extra salt and vinegar, the aroma so heady that she thought she might faint, each thick piece of potato hot and fizzling on her tongue.
When she got home that day the charity box had been emptied though it wasn’t yet Easter. The coins were stacked on the kitchen table. “There’s fifty pence missing,” her mother snarled. “It’s a fine little hussy I’m rearing, stealing from the mouths of the starving children of Africa.” Her mother flung her to the floor and made her lie face down, then pulled up the skirt of her school uniform and beat her with the handle of the sweeping broom, until she could beat her no more. “This hurts me far more than it hurts you,” her mother said, but Joanne thought that couldn’t be true.
“Ah-men.”
Joanne and Mrs. Ryan heard Father Sullivan’s drawn-out conclusion of the rosary coming from the kitchen downstairs, and the hushed prayers of the neighbors turned into a murmur of conversation that grew louder. The village had been waiting for several weeks for the old woman to die—there wouldn’t be much else going on in Ballinrea until Halloween. Elderly women recounted their own long dead in lugubrious tones; their husbands spoke of the farming and the football and the never-ending rain in grunts, ‘well nows’, and half-sentences that would never be finished. Then came the tinkle of teacups and ‘thank-yous’ as the sandwiches and cakes were passed around. Uncle Tommy was just waiting for the word from upstairs to open the whiskey.
A grey and white gull cried outside the bedroom window. Looking for her mother’s hairbrush, Joanne opened the top drawer of the dressing table and found it, lying on a photograph, the one she’d sent of herself and her wife on their wedding day in Islington. Her mother had cut out the image of Holly, leaving Joanne holding a hand attached to no one. The mutilated photo had been placed where she was sure to see it—her mother would have known that her only child would come back to perform this ritual, like it or not. She hesitated, thought of closing the drawer again and turning her back on the body, but she felt Mrs. Ryan’s eyes on her and so she picked up the brush. She began untangling the thin hair with shaking hands, carefully extending the long grey strands on the pillow. She tried to remember the last time she’d touched this hair, this face, but her memories were clouded now and there were tears in her eyes. She returned the hairbrush to its place on top of the remnants of her wedding photograph.
Mrs. Ryan gripped the stiffening jaw and signaled for Joanne to slide the dentures into the mouth. They didn’t quite fit. The thin lips remained parted, as if the old woman was about to speak. Joanne reached into her purse and took out a lipstick, a gift from Holly. Fiery fuchsia was just the sort of color her mother would have sneered at, or proclaimed with pride that she wouldn’t be seen dead in. Joanne applied it slowly and thickly to the cold lips. When finished, she dropped the lipstick into the drawer with the photograph, and she and Mrs. Ryan stood back to inspect their work. The glossy pink lips were a bright O around the dark hole of the mouth, as though her mother were surprised by this turn of events. Joanne thought she heard Mrs. Ryan chuckling softly.
Outside the sky had brightened and a murmuration of starlings swerved through the silvery air, catching the attention of the two women. The birds wheeled exuberantly before alighting on the telephone wires. Mrs. Ryan turned and brushed her fingers against Joanne’s cheek, a benediction delicate as the feathers of a small bird’s wing.
Downstairs, Uncle Tommy laughed and stamped a heavy boot on the floor, followed by a chorus of shushing. Mrs. Ryan closed the curtains again. Joanne sat on the chair to wait, while the neighbor went downstairs to tell everyone that the body was ready, and it was time for each of them to come upstairs and pay their own last respects.
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Laurence Lumsden is an Irish-Canadian writer living in Montreal, whose writing credits include Crannóg, Sky Island Journal, River, and The Galway Review. He was awarded the Cúirt New Writing Prize at the 2025 Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway. www.LaurenceWrites.com