Preserverance Or: The Bag of Bones

She began the same way she did every morning: putting herself together.

It didn’t take long.

Getting out of bed was the hardest part. Her daughter was up at six with her husband and her cat, so she could sleep another 45 minutes, which was always necessary. At 6:45, her daughter nudged her awake, which was usually with a question about afterschool activities, where an article of clothing was located, or homework, which was pointless because 5th grade math was completely beyond her anyway. And then she was awake and her body knew what to do and how fast it had to be done. There were 5 minutes for answering her daughter’s queries and locating anything she was missing, then 3 minutes for lunch preparation. This left her a full 12 minutes to wash her face, apply makeup, do her hair, and dress. She had already showered the night before. It was 20 minutes from being sound asleep to leaving the apartment, and she did it every morning. 

Then she and her daughter were out the door to school. Most days, after sending her into the building, she’d run into another elementary school parent on the way to the subway. They’d nod or wave, say “hi!” or “how are you?” in that friendly way where you never need to actually answer the question. She hadn’t had her coffee or breakfast yet, but she looked her best this time of day. Her skin looked its brightest, her figure its sveltest. And her body barely hurt at all.

She usually got a seat on the subway. That helped. If she didn’t, the ache would come sooner. By the time she reached her desk at work, breakfast in hand, the ache had come. It always came by then. There wasn’t much she could do about it. Exercise, stretching, Advil - they hadn’t helped. She had: an orthopedic pillow for her office chair, a special mouse pad that cradled her wrist, and a pair of blue-blocking glasses that helped her eye strain whilst staring into the abyss of her computer monitor. She was doing all she could.

The daily staff meeting was always at 10am. She had caught up on all her emails by then and finished her coffee but it was mostly during this meeting when everything began to unravel. It was usually Mitch LaShondrell’s fault, and not just because of his spectacularly bad name. She was explaining why her project was at a standstill when he decided to insert himself into the proceedings. Her eye began to twitch.  He didn’t know anything about the project or the work she had put into it. It didn’t matter - they listened to Mitch and not to her. 

And that’s when it happened.  Her eye fell out of its socket and landed on the conference room table with a splat.

No one noticed of course. They were too focused on Mitch. He always found a way to take up more time and space than everyone else; and to condescend to her specifically. She picked up her eyeball, cradled it in the palm of her hand like a contact lens, and quietly excused herself to the restroom without anyone turning their head. In the severe light of the ladies room, and with her eyeball missing, her complexion looked pallid. Her makeup had cracked under the eye socket, extending all the way down to her chin, which was looking especially jowly. And her grey roots were growing out; she’d have to dye them again soon. She tilted her head back and inserted the eyeball into its socket. She adjusted her makeup in the mirror and returned to her desk, where she had left her blue blocking glasses. She sank into the orthopedic pillow on her chair and winced at the growing ache. 

The meeting was out now and everyone was returning to their desks. She glanced at her phone and saw the reminder to get ballet recital tickets for her daughter’s performance at 10am. It was now 11:07am. She scrambled to the website; all the good seats were gone. She got three in the rear mezzanine. Her daughter would kill her.  She gritted her teeth. Her back molars cracked and crumbled like Pez and sprinkled out of the side of her mouth.

She brushed the broken teeth off the desk with a glide of her hand like a waiter cleaning a white table cloth and carefully funneled them into a small Tupperware container she had in a desk drawer which previously contained her calcium supplements. The irony was not lost on her that she should have refilled those pills two months ago. The loss of the molars had also loosened her jaw bone but it remained intact for now. She had brought leftover soup for lunch anyway.

After lunch,  she got a call from the credit card company about suspected fraud on her account. As she listened to all of her current charges, the ache became unbearable. She stretched her back and the bones broke through the skin. Her vertebrae collapsed one by one like dominoes onto the floor of her cubicle, each with a rattle and a thud.  She sighed. Cradling her phone between her shoulder and her ear, she collected them and clicked them back into place without drawing any attention to herself.

At five, she took 3 Advil and left her office as usual and remembered she needed to go to the grocery store. She texted her husband to make sure he could pick up their daughter from afterschool. She was almost relieved to go to the grocery store instead; at this time of day she looked her most pale and fissured; her jawbone was dangling by a thread and her posture had sunk after she had reattached her vertebrae. She was happy to avoid seeing other parents and managed to not run into anyone she knew in the aisles of Trader Joes. She balanced two heavy bags on her shoulders and carried another two in her rapidly deteriorating hands. As she walked up the three flights of stairs to her apartment, the weight became too much; her left arm fell off entirely, landing with a plop in a grocery bag on top of the plastic-wrapped kale salad.

She popped her arm back into its socket, put the groceries away, and fixed dinner. Her husband was buried in his laptop answering client emails and her daughter was doing her homework. They convened long enough for dinner, then it was time for her daughter’s bath and book and bedtime. Bending over to kiss her daughter goodnight, her eyeball almost fell out again, but she righted it with a tilt of her head. 

She felt tired enough to go to sleep herself, but her Advil had worn off and the ache was back and she didn’t want to get off the couch so she and her husband watched two episodes of that mystery show with the title she couldn’t remember that was ultimately bad but she needed to know who had framed Claire Danes for murder. By ten o’clock, she was in the shower before bed. She stood with her aching back directly under the stream from the shower head. Her skin began to dissolve under the hot water while it washed away the blood and tissue from her exposed skeletal frame. 

She got in bed, her husband turned off the light, and she kissed him goodnight. And then she snapped. Her head rolled off her body and into the crevice of her pillow. Her neck followed suit, and each vertebrae from her aching back continued; collapsing all the way down her frame past her femur, her ankles, her toes. Her body fell in pieces into the mattress until all that was left was a bag of bones. Just as it had every other night. There was nothing notable or distinct about the situation. 

It was just another day in the life of a woman over 40.

She began the same way she did every morning: putting herself together.

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