Grapes

Nothing could hurt Mrs Lancelote anymore. She was at the final stage of a disease that had been consuming her brain with robust appetite; she was no longer able to say, think or sense anything. When her daughter was talking about her struggles with spinal hernia; when her granddaughter informed her about the alien family she found in their basement, when her husband told her how much he regreted his lack of attention over the years, Mrs Lancelote felt exactly the same thing: a minor itch in the corner of her right eye.

‘What happened to my wife’s brain so she’s not with us anymore?’, Mr Lancelote once asked doctor Samuelson in Herold's Grocery Store where they bumped into each other. Mr Lancelote popped in the store to hand in his curriculum, so he could apply for the store assistant job Herold had advertised on the entrance door. Throughout the previous six scudding decades Mr Lancelote already worked as a baker, a gardener, an elevator boy, a receptionist, a bus driver, a hall porter and a boarding school principal; still he believed the time hadn't arrived yet to lie down on the bed and bore his heart stiff.

The doctor asked Herold to give him a grape, a bowl, salt and water. Mr Lancelote thought he was preparing a medicine. Apparently he was, but not for Mrs Lancelote. He was preparing a remedy for Mr Lancelote so he could stop worrying what if his wife was suffering deep inside. Unfortunately, due to growing up with a melancholic mother Doctor Samuelson sense for comforting people wasn't highly developed. He poured the water in the bowl, put the salt in, and then the grape. Then he asked Mr Lancelote to watch carefully. The little balls exploded one by one under the osmotic pressure.

‘This happened to the brain of your wife,’ the doctor said, pleased with himself. ‘Nothing is left inside.’ But Mr Lancelote wasn’t pleased. He had hoped for something more scientific. Something more acceptable than a raisin.

Because miracles happen, every once in a while Mrs Lancelote visited the old material that once was her. At these rare occasions, Mrs Lancelote tried to tell things to her husband that she found important to tell: that if he touches the light bulbs they live much shorter and he wastes a great deal of money; that she didn't mean those hurtful things she kept on saying over the years, it just felt right to see him hurt; that even when she's away she doesn't want the doctor or anyone else to tuck suppositories in her rectum; and that it was high time for her husband to stop recharging her batteries.

But when these miraculous moments occured, Mr Lancelote was watching television so he couldn’t hear her whisper. She couldn’t speak loud, as there was a very weak connection between the raisin and her speaking organs. At these rare occasions she did feel again too for a little while. What she felt was a mind gobbling frustration. ‘A grownup accepts frustration and solitude’, that’s what her husband often told her. 'A grownup accepts life as it is.' ‘Life can kiss my grownup ass,’ she murmured at the age of seventy, and disappeared again from her worn-out body.

On that Thursday afternoon, after cleaning the store Mr Lancelote arrived home, paid the nurse, sat down next to his dead wife on the sofa and turned the volume of the television on. He didn’t notice that his wife was dead until the end of the tennis game, as for the negligent observer there was no difference at all between dead and alive Mrs Lancelote. There was not much of a difference for Mrs Lancelote either, except that she didn’t have the itchy feeling in the corner of her right eye anymore.

He didn’t want to let the ambulance people take her body away. Why would they? They could live happily together ever after, just like before. When the remainder of Mrs Lancelote was gone, Mr Lancelote called his daughter to tell her the news and asked her if he could stay with them for a little while. Her daughter told him that he had to behave like an adult in hard times, and adults can bear pain and solitude. Mr Lancelote hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and his heart stopped. He opened his eyes and to his bitter surprise he was still alive. He closed his eyes and his heart stopped again. How many times a heart can stop without breaking? He counted and infinite was the answer.