A Fluid Confession

The midnight ring of a phone never brings good news. A frown creased Doug’s caramel forehead. Moving through a thick fog of dread, he snatched the vibrating phone. His heart hammered violently against his ribs.

"Hello?"

"Doug." Uncle Phil’s voice sounded like static and gravel. "Your grandmother. She just took her last breath."

The bedroom air turned to ice. Doug choked on his own breath, the words sticking to his tongue. "What? What happened?"

"Heart attack," Phil rasped. "We just found her. She was cold... right there on the bed in the guest room."

“Okay," Doug choked out. He disconnected the call with a trembling thumb and immediately dialed his mother.

"Mom," he said, the words falling like lead weights, "Grandmom is dead."

Across town, the news struck his mother like a physical blow. She bolted upright in bed, her fingers tangling frantically into her curly hair as her breath caught. "I don't understand. She was fine. What happened?"

Doug stared blankly at the peeling wallpaper of his dark room. "Phil said it was a heart attack."

"I don't understand how that could happen," Rita cried, her voice cracking over the line. "Last month, the doctor assured me she was fine! And why did they even move her from my place to theirs when they're never home?"

The air inside the funeral home smelled sickly sweet, thick with lilies and heavy silence. But the moment Rita approached the casket and saw her deceased mother, a sharp gasp cut through the quiet.

"Her face is smashed," Rita whispered audibly, her eyes widening in horror. "I don't understand. How could they have an open casket when her face is smashed? What happened?"

None of the mourners looked up. No one paid attention to her. Even after Rita sank into a folding chair next to Doug, her daughter Marie, and her sister Louise. Rita repeated the words under her breath like a mantra with pauses. Her face is smashed. Her face is smashed. Most of her family stared straight ahead, offering nothing but frozen silence.

The tension only twisted tighter on the way to the burial plot. Louise leaned in, her glasses slipping way down on her nose. As usual the firing of her nasty, passive-aggressive comments stung like venom. Louise’s consistent implications left no doubt about her personal verdict, that Rita had been a terrible daughter. When the procession finally halted at the gravesite, Louise stood up to toss her farewell flower. She stumbled forward, moving with the frail, halting gait of a ninety-year-old woman, though she was barely middle-aged.

CHAPTER TWO

Louise arrived at her niece Marie’s house after the funeral already smelling of stale liquor. She sank heavily onto the sofa, a fresh glass of wine trembling in her hand. The alcohol quickly loosened her tongue, and the whispers began.

"I gave her too much morphine," Louise murmured, chuckling and staring blankly into her glass. "Then we were trying to move her to the bathroom, and... we dropped her."

As the wine flowed, so did the gruesome details. Louise spoke with a detached, chilling calmness, painting a horrific picture of what happened in that guest room before Uncle Phil made the late-night call.

The moment the front door clicked shut behind Louise, Marie was speed dialing her phone to speak with her cousin, Joy. Her heart overtaking her throat as the line ringed.

"Joy!" Marie gasped the moment her cousin answered. "Did you drop off my mom or Louise First? What did Louise say when you left her off? Did she tell you her story about giving Grandmom too much morphine and dropping her?"

There was a heavy, suffocating silence on the other end of the line.

"Yes, first I dropped off my mom. Then Louise told her story.” Joy answered quietly.

Marie felt the room tilt. "What do you think? Did it really happen that way?"

"I really believe it did," Joy whispered.

Marie gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles turned white. "If Louise really did that... if she killed Grandmom, we can’t just sit on this, Joy."

"But what do we do?" Joy’s voice trembled through the speaker. "Louise was wasted. If we blow this up, it destroys the whole family."

"It’s already destroyed," Marie whispered, looking toward the window. If we tell my mom, she’ll lose her mind and confront Louise immediately. It’ll be a screaming match, and Louise will just deny it."

"So we tell Doug first," Joy suggested, a sharp intake of breath sounding over the line. "He’s calm. He can help us figure out how to handle Mom."

Marie nodded to the empty room. "Yeah. We tell Doug."

An hour later, Doug sat at his kitchen table, staring blankly at the cold cup of coffee between his hands. The front door had barely clicked shut behind Marie and Joy before they spilled the entire story.

Too much morphine. A dropped body. A smashed face covered up by a hasty funeral.

Doug felt a sick, hollow weight settle deep in his stomach. He looked from Marie to Joy, searching their faces for any sign of a misunderstanding, but found only pure terror. His aunt Louise had confessed. The truth was out, and it was a nightmare.

"Stay here," Doug said, his voice flat, drained of all emotion. "I have to call my mom. She deserves to know why her mother is dead."

Rita answered on the second ring, her voice still thick from crying. "Doug? What is it? Did you find out something about the funeral?"

Doug closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the cool kitchen wall. "Mom, I need you to listen to me very carefully. And I need you to sit down."

"Doug, you're scaring me. What's wrong?"

"Marie and Joy just came over," Doug said slowly, forcing the words past the lump in his throat. "Louise got drunk after the burial. Mom... she told them what happened in the guest room. She gave Grandmom too much morphine. And when they tried to move her, they dropped her. That’s why her face was smashed."

The silence on the other end of the line was absolute, stretching out so long Doug thought the call had dropped. Then came the ragged, broken sound of his mother’s breath, turning into a sharp, piercing gasp of realization. "Mom?" Doug asked, the phone pressed hard against his ear. "Are you there?"

"She killed her," Rita whispered, her voice suddenly hollow, stripped of all tears. "Louise killed my mother. And Phil helped her cover it up."

"Mom, listen to me—"

"I can't face her, Doug. I can't look at her," Rita interrupted, her words tumbling out in a panicked rush. "I won't confront her. She’ll just lie, or scream, or turn the whole family against me like she always does. But she can’t get away with this."

Rita took a sharp, shaky breath. "You have to go to the police, Doug. You and Joy. You have to tell them what Louise said."

"Mom, we can't do that," Doug said quietly, rubbing his temples. "I didn't hear the confession. Marie and Joy did, and Louise was blind drunk when she said it. The cops won't do anything based on hearsay from a drunk woman at a funeral."

Doug hung up the phone and walked back into the kitchen, where Marie and Joy were waiting. The silence in the room was suffocating.

"She wants us to go to the authorities," Doug announced, pulling out a chair.

Joy immediately shook her head, her face pale. "No. No way. I'm not going to the police, Doug. Louise is my grandmother. If I go to the cops, Grandpa Phil will be out to get us. My Grandma will hate me. The whole family will rip itself apart."

"But she admitted to it, Joy!" Marie cried, though her voice lacked conviction. She looked down at her lap, her shoulders sagging. "But... I don't want to go to the station either. What if the police look at us like we're crazy? What if they exhume Grandmom's body? I can't handle that."

Doug looked between his sister and his cousin. He felt the crushing weight of the family secret settling over the kitchen like a heavy dust.

"So that's it then," Doug said, his voice flat. "We all know the truth. Mom knows. We know. But nobody is going to say a word."

The weeks following the funeral passed in a tense, agonizing quiet. No police were called. No charges were filed.

The family still gathered for Sunday dinners at Rita’s house, sitting around the same dining table. Except for Louise and her husband Phil. They never attended. At their home, Phil still poured Louise her heavy glasses of wine as her hands trembled slightly. Her eyes never quite met his.

Phil sat across from Louise in total silence. He was usually rocking in his chair, grasping the pillow from his diseased mother in law’s bed in his lap. Phil would twist his fist into it’s center, refusing to make eye contact with his wife. Louise spent most of her time glaring at Phil but never uttering a word of accusation. He spent his days wondering where else to get money for his failing business.

The family members who heard the confession buried the horror beneath polite smiles and passing dishes. Grandmom’s contorted expression was hidden beneath the earth and in their memories. They remained at peace as the days passed, tying to ignore the secret they all thought they understood. While elsewhere, Uncle Phil sat guiltily holding the pillow.