Ending Things - John Fetto

Ginny Moore shifted in her wheelchair. Her back ached, and when her back ached her head sagged. She tried to hold up her weight with her elbows, but it only helped a bit, and it hurt her elbows. She could take another pain pill but then she couldn’t sit on the porch, and she wanted to watch her daughter work on her roses along the fence, the blue roses. Ginny ordered them in a catalogue and planted them herself God knows how many years ago. She used to prune them herself but now her daughter Johanna had to do it and she would be god damned if she was going to take a pill and sit on the coach and watch the damn t.v., when she could see her only daughter working on her favorite roses, trimming them back, so they’d get another bloom, cutting back what’s dead or almost dead, so something beautiful and new could grow. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it would always be. So rather than sit on coach making herself a little more comfortable as she waited for her life to end, Ginny was out on the porch looking at her daughter, looking at Jo, the part of her that was still beginning, trimming the roses that would bloom, long after Ginny was gone.