“Ta-DA!” We enter her room holding the box aloft.
Mother rights herself in her bed in increments, refusing outstretched hands, scoots her purple-splotched feet into worn fuzzy slippers and shuffles to the only comfortable chair in the room. She stretches a pilled throw over her lap, and taps it — a silent request for us to place the box there. She fusses with the bow, but knobby fingers can’t manage. She shrugs another request. We carefully remove the silver ribbon and spiral it around the bare foot-high tree the pricey non-denominational home has provided each resident for the holiday. The silver paper we fold with great ceremony and lay it on her table next to crumpled tissues and a half-empty box of assorted chocolates, gold wrappers smoothed out and stacked on the side.
She lifts the lid, scratches through silver tissue paper, regards our present in its nest of red foil hearts. Nice touch, we’d told the gift wrapper. Spare nothing.
Mother stares at it for a very long time. She looks askance at this year’s offering, and then at us, her so-why-would-I-need-yet-another-useless-thing-in-a-room-I-can’t-swing-a-cat-in-that-you-pay-for-and-never-let-me-forget-it-thank-you-very-much look. “It’s so…shiny.” She winces at her wide-angle reflection in its silver surface, the room window curving behind and framing her souring face. “It’s making me dizzy.”
It’s certainly something to boast about to her pinochle group, we suggest, looking at each other, nodding our heads.
“Lovely,” she says, not looking at it, or at us, but out the window at the grey clouds overhead. She shuts the lid and nudges the box perilously close to the edge of her knees, grinning as it teeters. My brain dives for the box, but the rest of me freezes. My wife plays goalie, catches it before it hits the floor.
Mother looks out the window again. It’s starting to snow. Her thin voice rasps our ears. “You keep it.” She reaches into the box of candy at her side, chooses a chocolate caramel that will stick to her bridge. “Leave the paper, though.” She shifts from chair to bed, closes her eyes, waves us away.
Author: Mikki Aronoff advocates for animals and scribbles away in New Mexico. Her work has been longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction.