The Sun Lady

The size of the house is deceiving; from the outside it looks much how you would expect a pensioners home to look, small, minimalist. You enter the steel gate and embark on a journey through an immense garden, filled with wild birds, to find the front door and your quick fix.

Inside; the house is narrow but seems to go on and on like a school corridor. Her home is beiges, pinks and creams and every room except for the dilapidated kitchen is carpeted. The walls around the kitchen counter are covered in shelves with ornaments of little children and flowers and bears and the serenity prayer is laminated and stuck on the wall with putty.

Photographs inhabit tables of every kind, pictures of her deceased husband; heart attack. She talks of him still, almost as if he is still with her, somewhere in the back doing man-like things.

Her skin is brown leather, with blots of purple and marks that are plastered. She knocks one accidently and it bleeds; it doesn’t stop after that. She is the poster girl for the effects of sun, the effects of fake sun.
She can’t be older than 60, yet she waffles and repeats herself as frequently as your average 80 something year old and she often pauses, rather lengthily; trying to find the words? Attempting to remember?

Days of our Lives reruns on the television; a couple is lying on a bed telling each other how much they love each other and she says: sex, love, sex, love, these people don’t know what they want, she says this angrily as she hands me the sachet of cream with my name on it. She offers to do my back and I decline, slipping my shoes off my feet and ushering her out the door; she won’t leave if I don’t.
When I’m done, I walk back to the kitchen counter where receipts are written up and change is given and as I am putting a few coins into my purse, the door buzzer sounds and her next appointment opens the gate and begins her journey through the garden.

I say my goodbyes, a casual “see you later.”

And as I walk to the front door I pass the lounge, together with the smell of sweat and tanning cream on my reddened skin, my olfactory nerve notices another scent, far more pungent, far more disturbing. A smell like hopelessness, resignation; the lonely decay of a life that is just going through the motions, a life ended without ending.