Her seventieth birthday was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Agnes had kept the vial of poison in a drawer with her underwear for near twenty years, from the days she worked at the chemist shop.
‘Someday I might want to use it,’ she thought, tucking it away with a sense of quiet control.
It became a secret companion to her solitude.
Life had grown increasingly barren; her friends had passed, her family estranged, and her modest savings dwindled to nothing. The world seemed to have forgotten her. Now, she was seventy, all that she could see ahead of her were days of loneliness and poverty.
As rain tapped against her window, she made her decision. She wrote a note in her delicate, looping handwriting: ‘I wish for my body to be donated to the university. Perhaps in death, I can be of some use.’
With a trembling hand, she uncorked the vial and swallowed its contents.
She waited in her chair for hours, staring at the faded wallpaper until she lost consciousness. When the sun rose the next morning, painting her floor gold, she was still alive. The poison had passed its use-by date and lost its strength.
She laughed, a dry, startled sound. Perhaps, she thought, the universe wasn’t done with her after all.
Unexpectedly, there was a knock at the door. An elderly man with a lop-sided grin, ‘Hello love, I’m Tom, I’ve just moved in next door.’
It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 