******

She glances towards the window, eyes fixing on the flawless blue sky
outside. She feels tendrils of heat edging across the bedcover, slowly
diffusing the numbness. Bed rest is hell, she's decided, and this is only
the first day. Discharged from hospital this morning after her successful
operation, and Buffy and Dawn are buzzing around her, coddling and
smothering her with good intentions. She gives brave and grateful smiles but
they're getting thinner and thinner.

She just wants to get out of bed and return to a normal life. And after all
the fruit her daughters, their friends, and well-wishers from work brought
her in hospital, she never wants to eat another orange or bunch of grapes
again.

For the moment, she'll go along with it. Rest, relaxation, careful diet,
taking one day at a time. She's almost scornful about the cliches that
everyone wants to apply to her situation. Neighbours and acquaintances keep
filling the awkward silences with earnest platitudes about second chances,
her good fortune - her good fortune? Good grief, a lump the size of golf
ball has been removed from her head! But she smiles on cue, because it's the
pleasant thing to do.

Madness had almost been a release. There were no constraints regarding
social niceties. Only brief, all too fleeting moments of clarity pushing at
the dark spaces. Sometimes she misses the clarity.

Her eyes focus on the wind chime dangling above the window. It's cheap and
tacky and not the sort of thing she would usually hang in her home but the
way it catches the light, the way the warm breeze pushes it around so
slowly, is pretty. If her so-called brush with her own mortality has taught
her anything, it's to savour the pretty things. In the end, that's all there
is.

Her pretty, precious daughters and the beauty of trivial things.

She remembers the exact time and date when she had bought that wind chime --
can almost feel the memory take over her and transplant her to another
place. They'd driven down to Mexico, she and Hank, three years before Buffy
was born. It'd been summer and the shimmering haze of humidity had risen
high off the dusty road as they drove. Their first car, no air conditioning,
but she'd loved it. Hank just complained during the whole trip. He hated the
bugs and the fact that few of the locals spoke English. She kept telling him
it was adventurous, that he ought to loosen up and enjoy it.

Things had started to go wrong, even back then. She just couldn't see it at
the time.

In any case, he'd rolled his eyes when she came across the trinket stall
near the border. Told her not to waste her money. But she'd always liked
pretty, frivolous things and she bought it partly to irk him. When they got
back from the trip, she'd hung the chime in her dorm room, even though there
was never much of a breeze at her window. In some small way it was a tiny
act of rebellion against him.

It brings a rueful smile to her lips now. She wonders, briefly, if she
should call Hank - assuming he's still living in Spain - and tell him about
the health scare. The tumour, she corrects silently, because why should she
cosset herself from that simple fact? Funny, she doesn't really want his
sympathy, doesn't want anything from him any more now that he's just a
stranger on the margins of her life.

She's content to lie here -- for now -- and admire the pretty,
inconsequential patterns that the wind chime creates on the wall.

The End