An Extremely Bleak, Russian-style Short Story I Created in August 2013 and last Modified in July 2014

A Journey – of a widow from her bed to her bathroom with the express purpose of urination

It was morning and the light was shining on the bed through the window, the curtain funnelling it into a sharp and sallow beam. She could feel its warmth on her face, but it was cold elsewhere in the room. Cold and silent.

Got to get up.

The clock to her right, on the bedside table, was a black digital alarm clock. It was a clock manufactured in the 1980s (she had had it since the 1980s, when she bought it with her husband at that technology store that doesn’t exist anymore on Strone St near the station; it had sat in the exact same place since then) and its red, segmented numbers read 9:00.

Time to get up.

She grabbed the doona in her hand and carefully lifted it up and off her body. Now she felt very cold. She was fully exposed, too, apart from the thin protection afforded by her nightgown. Conscious of being exposed, her eyes drifted down her body: it was frail and gaunt and wrinkled and spotted and quite hideous.

It’s cold.

She sat up, using her arm as a shaky support, then slowly swung her legs round until they were hanging off the bed, then carefully stepped down on to the ground; it was freezing-cold.

Floorboards, always so cold in the morning.

Her slippers were neatly placed, equidistantly apart, just where she was placing her feet. She put her feet inside them, then she stood up.

She began to walk gingerly towards her old wooden wardrobe, feeling the stiffness of her legs and feeling pain in her hips and knees. She clasped her hands around the knob on the wardrobe door and pulled it: the door creaked open, slowly. Her dressing gown was hanging on a coat-hanger to the left, away from all the other articles of clothing which she hadn’t worn for a long time. It was blue and fluffy.

She remembered buying it, recently, at Myer. It was the last proper thing she had purchased, and even so, she had only bought it out of necessity, which was that her last one had been so tatty, and washed to such a state of thinness, that it verged on nonexistence. She had not enjoyed buying it either: she had not enjoyed going to the shopping mall, she had not enjoyed how everything was so big and noisy and shiny and grand, and she had not enjoyed the false friendliness of the staff at the shop. She had returned home on the bus with a bitter taste in her mouth. And when she had entered her house that day she had felt even more miserable. The house had felt even colder and more deathly silent than usual.

But she had quickly tried to cheer herself up because she knew being miserable was pointless.

Misery – that sick feeling in the stomach, those thoughts, those frenzied thoughts – what was the point of even humouring it?

Just after entering the house, she had started running the bath. Then she got in, began reading a Spike Milligan book and her misery dissipated within no time at all. She always followed that exact same procedure when she felt down. Spike Milligan books were great destressing agents, she found, because they were so stupid. She liked them – despite having read all of them at least three times each – because they distracted her with their ridiculous humour.

She put the dressing gown on. It felt fluffy and warm. Now wearing both her slippers and her dressing gown, the atmosphere no longer felt so hostile; no longer so cold and big and empty. It remained silent though. The only sound was the gentle padding of her slippers on the floorboards as she hobbled solemnly into the ensuite bathroom.

Her bathroom was almost entirely green and very out-dated in style. She knew its appearance must seem bizarre to a stranger, but she, personally, was used to it. In the bathroom’s far right corner was a fairly-standard looking toilet and it was that which she was walking towards.

As she did walk towards it, she made a note to herself not to look into the mirror above the sink. She took a slight sideways glance anyway; she immediately regretted it. When she reached the toilet, she sat down and urinated, listening to the sound of her piddle connecting with the toilet water and thinking of little. After that was finished, she stood up slowly, with sore knees, and flushed the toilet. Subsequently, she walked over to the sink – looking down to avoid the mirror – turned the tap on, and washed her hands. She rubbed them slowly and carefully against the hand-towel, making sure they were completely dry.

She turned on the cold shower tap, then the hot one.  

The day would be long.