Glossy brochure, smooth to the touch. It isn’t a run-of-the-mill facility, Sarah thinks. It promises peace of mind, dedicated professionals to care for Mother. 5-star accommodation. Season-appropriate air-conditioned comfort. Enrichment programs: crafts to keep minds nimble, gentle calisthenics to keep bodies as supple as arthritis will allow, music and entertainment, massages. Heck, it sounds like a vacation to Sarah. Mother’s last, no doubt. The food? Organic, ethically-sourced fresh ingredients. Mother will get to eat healthy, cholesterol controlled, diabetes disciplined. All credit cards welcome. Flexible payment plans available to select few. They even offer 24/7 personalized online counseling to family—that’ll be Sarah, only child and next-of-kin—to help cope with the change. She almost misses the fine print: an option for pre-planning of deceased estate management via an accredited solicitor, be it rent or sale. And when the inevitable end comes, in-house Life-Cycle Celebrants conduct end-of-life ceremonies and take care of everything: casket, funeral service (all religions, all denominations welcome), burial or cremation.

Sarah sits back. A choice that’s really no choice at all. But she’s put it off too long already. Time to recognize facts, be less indecisive. Once she rationalizes it, she stops shirking.

They’re all courteous, all smiles. Mother’s ambulant, Sarah insists, when they trundle in a gurney. Standard practice, they say and shrug, strapping Mother down.

Outside, before the van’s doors slam, Sarah flinches. She’s seen, shut her eyes too late: Mother’s left ear folded like an envelope on that gurney. No one else notices.

Oh Mum.

The van speeds away. Rooted to the spot, a certain premonition rises like heat from the bitumen up through Sarah’s soles: she’d go, too, without protest, be fed gruel and shit in bedpans until her death.

Margaret Suganthy Parker is a Sydney-based writer. Her fiction and poetry appear in Hecate Journal (University of Queensland), Kitaab, Unlost Journal (USA), Microflix (microfiction shortlisted for 2021 Microflix Awards and adapted to film), Grieve Anthology, and elsewhere. Her writing delves into familial relationships, identity, memory and trauma. She holds a masters in creative writing from the University of Sydney.