Fade to Black Read Free

makeup had come off on her bathrobe where she had propped her face on her arms while she slept. She looked at herself in the mirror, rubbing arthritic fingers across the smeared streaks of her left cheek.
    “Stella, you need a facial,” she told herself, calming down.
    Her wheelchair was motorized, with a control box mounted at the front end of the right armrest. She wrapped a pudgy palm over the round knob of the gearshift and powered herself back from the table and across the room to her closet.
    Midnight rose from the bed and pranced across the covers, easily clearing the distance to the wheelchair. Halfway through its purred greeting, the cat found itself swatted back into the air by the back of Aunt Stella’s hand.
    “How many times have I told you about pouncing like that, you little panther!” Stella screamed, not joking. Midnight quickly came to its feet and ran off into the kitchen.
    Given the choice of making the best or worst of her handicap, Aunt Stella had chosen the latter. As far as she was concerned, the world had played a despicable trick on her, and, by God, they would be made to pay for it. Unfortunately for Midnight and Eric, they were the only world Stella made contact with these days. She hadn’t left the house any more than a dozen times in the past few years.
    As such, her wardrobe was stocked primarily with bathrobes and housecoats. Vivid pinks and greens, a few blues, most of them simple terry cloth but a few fashioned of other material. She chose one of the pinks and took it with her into the bathroom, where she cursed her way through the complicated motions of her morning toilette.
    When she wheeled back out, her face was plain and haggard, her hair a mop of limp waves spilling over the crown of her head. She turned on her radio and tuned into her obligatory Sunday services, letting the room fill with unheard platitudes while she positioned herself before the vanity. She spent the next hour and a half reconstructing the foundation and layered touches of makeup, then worked at her hair with a brush, blow-dryer, and aerosol can filled with a combination of cosmetic glue and fluorocarbons meant to hold the assembled wreckage together.
    Braced to start another day, Aunt Stella wheeled out of her room, ignoring the paper left at the foot of her bed, and went to the hallway. Her roving chair hummed like a vacuum cleaner running on high octane.
    She and Eric had lived here on Market Street for more than twenty years. The mortgage payments were low, and there were other conveniences, foremost being the special touches that had been added to the house to accommodate Aunt Stella’s confinement to her wheelchair. Between her bedroom and the inside staircase, an elevator the size of a glorified dumbwaiter had been installed to give her easy access to the second floor and Eric’s room, much to his chagrin.
    As she rode up the elevator, Aunt Stella tightened her grip on the baton resting across her knees. She was seldom without the staff. It was of negligible use to her as a handicap aid; she employed it more as a means of dissipating nervous energy, much in the way others smoked, cracked their knuckles, or toyed with wedding rings. At various times, she would wield it like anything from a general’s riding crop to a bishop’s sceptre to a magician’s wand.
    By the time she opened the elevator door and wheeled herself into the upstairs hallway, Aunt Stella had worked herself up into another frightful mood. She knocked on the doorframe to Eric’s room and called out his name as she came in.
    He was asleep, still dressed in his clothes on top of the covers, bathed by the glowing eye of his television set.
    Aunt Stella stopped at the foot of the bed and leaned forward, supporting herself on the baton braced across her armrests. She screwed her face up, baring an insidious grin.
    “Well, look here,” she cackled, “Mister Smart fell asleep with his nose buried in the screen again. That one-eyed