Persistent Vegetative State by Paul Radcliffe
from MOTHER: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
Persistent Vegetative State
by
Paul Radcliffe
We see responses when there are none.
We see what we want to see.
Mothers, however, when looking at their children, see more clearly than most.
It had been three years. Pub fight. A son kicked in the head. Persistent Vegetative State.
Mother visited every week. Family news. Regards from aunties. Friends concerned and asking. Big game coming up. Pushing a wheelchair around the park.
Until this Saturday.
Mum pushed the heavy wheelchair up the gentle concrete slope to the station platform. Her son’s eyes saw nothing, and he did not hear the approaching train.
Mum pushed the wheelchair to the yellow line. The warning message: Stay Behind This Line.
She knew her son had gone, and a shell remained. A cartoon. A breathing parody of life. Tube feeding and eyes blindfolded forever by brain damage.
Is that a life?
Mum had made her mind up.
The train howled forward.
She heaved, and for an instant there was a glimpse of falling metal and a stained tracksuit.
A mother’s love is like no other.
Bio:
Paul Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions. Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations. He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring feeding and practicing hypnosis.
that was quite a moment at the end