It's pouring with rain. The tap drips in sync until the room feels like an underwater cave. She's standing in the bathroom with her hands gripping the cold wood of the countertop, staring at the mirror with it's reflection of gum trees and her besides. The light is rude. It spotlights her flaws.
It is a difficult thing, for a woman to transition to cronehood. The silver hairs plucked at the mirror give way to hair dye, the foundation smoothed in the crows feet or laugh lines, depending on how she felt about them in the morning. Logic informs that age is natural, but vanity is a friend who holds tight, despite the years. She tries to own it, fails. Becomes invisible, most days, which is a relief. After awhile she finds herself appreciating this. It's not as if she doesn't want to bother, it's just she doesn't have to. She is loved, anyway.
The rain slows. She hears a magpie warble, the song stealing through the dusty flywire and sitting on the windowsill for a moment. Time is still. She smells toothpaste and her man's sandalwood lingering.
This face in the mirror is meant to be wise. She still drinks too much and says the wrong thing at parties. She doesn't learn how to budget or to fold her washing, and when she sweeps the floor, little mounds of dirt gather in the corner and she cannot find the energy to sweep them up. Her mother tells that she folds the washing as it comes off the line for perhaps the hundredth time in her life time, and she still dumps the whole lot in a basket in the bedroom and only folds it when it threatens to topple or if she can't find her bra. Adulthood, in some ways, is beyond her. She wonders a lot why domesticity is an expectation of adulthood, and has long given up any effort to claim it.
She rubs steam from the mirror and looks again. Dust motes tango in the light.
As far as adulthood goes, she hasn't done too badly. She had a child and didn't kill it. She remembers him as Superman, flying around Spain with a cape. She loved her single mother years. She recalls the love more than the longing, how proud she was of her little boy. She has a whole suitcase of stories in her heart she likes to take out sometimes and look at, both sides. The trip to Europe, backpacking, just to the two of them. Him covered in cherry juice in Berlin and dancing to buskers. Being terrified of a real knight in Praha castle even though he loved the plastic swords she'd make him out of Sprite bottles and cardboard. Eating queso fresco on crackers on their knees at a busstop in Portugal. Rainbow soap bubbles blowing in the wind. Picking blackberries on the Dingle Peninsula, being so ill with a cold that she could barely get out of bed, dangling one arm off the mattress and moving lego pieces around in a show of motherhood. He remembers blackberry pancakes.
'Why do they keep calling me Superman?' he says, annoyed at strangers attempting high fives.
'It's the t-shirt, honey', she says. 'It's a dead giveaway'.
They walk on cobbled streets, up mountains to see monastries, waterfalls. His feet hurt, she carries him. He cries when his legs stay put for too long and she rubs and kisses them. He can sleep on a train on luggage and not wake for hours whilst she stares out of the window and imagines how life will unfold. He hides behind streetlights in Krakow, knowing she can see him, but making her laugh as he springs out and shouts: 'Boo!'.
They both remember the towers coming down, the world transitioning into something it would become.
Nothing stays the same.
She is happy when she becomes her own again - her partner doesn't have the same demands a child does. She likes her independence. To be alone. To lean into the world on her own terms. Still, she worries for him, for a time, until she knows he is solid. Now he makes her laugh through texts, suddenly, out of the silence of weeks, where she forgets she is a mother at all.
Her phone beside the sink. Still she grips the countertop.
All birds fly the nest. Superman becomes a man. He grows a beard and has a job and a partner.
She flips the phone over, barely breathing.
'Not long now, Mum', the text reads. 'She's transitioning, we think'. The two of them in the labour ward, and her heart hurting with the thrill of it.
She sweeps the grey from her forehead, gathering her hair into a mess of a bun. Grandma. She tests the word, checks it against who she is.
Thinks of kissing his knees.
'Boo', she laughs at herself in the mirror, and cries with joy.
This is my response to the Inkwell prompt, 'Boo'. You can find this in the community. Those of you that know me might have guessed it's less of a fiction as I await the birth of my grandchild, them in the labour ward today. It's 3pm and it could be any minute now - in fact, I might be announcing in the comments as you reply to this, if you read it. Filled with nervous excitement, I decided to turn it into a piece of writing that is, of course, largely autobiographical, thinking of my son that is having a child today. I'm actually at work - I'm not in a bathroom at all, but I was meant to think about setting. I hoped it would read as a story, I think, of any woman who is transitioning - child, mother, wife, grandmother crone.