And it is all the time now she can hear the wasps, even when temporarily absent, their ubiquity having created a perpetually audible low residual hum she can neither not hear nor ever quite bring to focus, and in which her paranoia infers a correlation; reduced to such persistent and yet sufferable tinnitus, every room of this house in which he had never lived has become host to that echo of her dead husband’s voice.
And it is to this soundtrack of her own madness she adds periodically, intoning e.g.
Mother: “ELVIS PRESLEY IS DEAD”
unaware of herself a decade and more in arrears of a culture which in its continued momentum is passing her by at some speed, and in whose wake she did not even recognise herself abandoned, mired as she is in the stasis of her own lunacy.
And it is in the new and sustained absence of her only remaining child, now grown, she locates herself in freefall toward the embrace of this exact inescapable psychosis, collecting up the stoppered bottle of her husband’s bay rum and pouring out into her palm a measure to wring between her fingers; to hope in such she might of him disinfect herself; to inhale the clove scent like an element of venom prescribed as its own antidote.
And it is all the while above her in the attic those two dead and bandage-wrapped bullets haunt the rafters.
