The clouds are near and very moist. They press down, down, down, closing in on the horizon, the little town, the sea front, my skull. 

‘Tastes like rain,’ my mother says. She likes to say things like that. A motherism, I think. A Margaretism. 

‘Yes,’ I reply, and steer her down the sandy boardwalk by the elbow. Bone sharp, skin loose. ‘Yes,’ I say again, louder, though she isn’t listening. 

On the beach, I crouch to unbuckle my mother’s sandals, knees sinking into wet grit, her palm resting lightly atop my head. For balance. I make a mental note that her toenails need cutting and try to remember her helping me dress, or undress, but I can’t. 

My mother pads carefully along the cove. She points at rock pools and coos at crabs. ‘An anemone!’ she says, bright as salt, and I marvel and rage at how someone can remember the word anemone but not their daughter’s name, not their daughter’s daughter’s name. 

I helped my daughter out of sandals and wellies and black Mary-Janes. I got dirt on my knees, and aches in my hips, and worse, for her. 

When my mother wants to paddle (because her ‘blood’s going stiff’, another Margaretism), I roll up her jeans and mine, and hold her hand as we step into the shallows. The shells are sharp beneath our feet. 

‘Cold!’ she shouts, smile wide, face cracked open. 

The water rolls turgid green, glitter-flecked from the knuckle of sunlight pressing through the thick of cloud. I think of churned-up bath water, small kicking feet. The sea breathes in and out, and so do we – though not together.

When her teeth begin to chatter, I dry my mother off and take her to a cafe by the promenade. The windows are steamed, tables sticky with sugar sachets. I place mouthfuls of crumbly carrot cake onto a fork and she turns up her nose when I try to feed her. 

‘I am not a child,’ she says, eyes darkening to granite, and I am reminded of her old self, the one from my childhood, who could turn blood to ice with a look. The aeroplane, with its carrot cake cargo, U-turns into my mouth. I eat the whole thing, thinking of how I used to coax, plead, beg my daughter to eat. One more bite, for me, for mummy. Sweet buttercream dissolves on my tongue and I feel a little sick. 

My mother has lived with me – or I with her – since winter. I rented the little bungalow on the edge of town as I thought the sea air might be good for both of us, which made my daughter laugh. 

‘She’s mad and you’re divorced,’ she said. ‘You’re not Victorians with consumption.’ Even over the phone, even across time zones, I could hear the dry edge to her laughter; see the dark knot in her brow. She’d have shifted the phone to her shoulder, glanced over to the American boyfriend, who’d have shrugged – supportively. Not your circus, not your monkeys, babe. 

By the time we reach the track home, the sky is a bruised silver, the faint scent of rot and pennies in the air. I cannot bear to return to a dark house, so the bungalow glows – a cube of yellow light against the dunes. The card my daughter sent from Chicago for my birthday still sits on the sill. 

I let us in. My mother is agitated. Sand will trail through all the rooms; the towels will never quite dry; my daughter will never quite say what she means. ‘Can’t keep the outside out,’ my mother snaps. 

I make more tea and eventually she falls asleep on the sofa, one hand curled beneath her chin like a shell, the other dangling. I tidy our mugs, hang our jeans on the radiator. I

shake them out and watch grains of sand fall from the seams into the carpet – tiny, shining, infinite. 

My mother stirs, sighs and sinks again. I should get her into her bed but, for now at least, I can’t. Instead, I take her cool, dangling hand, paper skin turned translucent, all tendons and smacked bottoms and wiped tears and smoothed hair and clasped purses and purple, pushing veins that remind us that she is, in fact, alive, and place it to my cheek. Press her knuckles to my lips. Hold fingertips to eyelids. And I wonder which of us will let go first, of this strange little life in the dunes. 

Outside, the sea breathes over and over. 

So do I.

By Elizabeth Cooke

Litro Magazine

aging caregiving dementia family flash fiction litro stories memory Mother Daughter sea