Roses
(Signs of the Times is a work of fiction based on true events. Views expressed are the characters’ own. Viewer discretion is advised.)
The television glowed in the corner of a dark room. Blue light danced across tobacco-stained wallpaper, peeling and yellow. Where once Becky saw the perfect symmetry of roses tied with pink bows repeating across the walls of her childhood home, she now saw a reminder of the indifferent, apathetic slide towards decay and death.
For years, Becky watched her mother and father slip into this sedentary depression. They withdrew from the church. They stopped volunteering. They watched TV, drank diet coke, and smoked newports.
The curtains were always drawn. When Becky’s mother had a stroke and passed away in the hospital, her father gripped Becky’s hand so hard she had bruises the next day. Love manifests in mysterious ways.
But the emotions cooled after the funeral for Becky’s father. He lived almost entirely in his swivel recliner. He still watched TV, drank diet coke, and smoked newports.
But on the morning that Becky visited her father, examining the wallpaper and the photos hanging with a thin layer of dust on the plate glass, she sighed. She watched her father stare at the TV screen. Unmoved. Unprovoked. Indifferent to some crisis, some tragedy, some deeply violent and racist thing happening on the TV.
She crossed into the living room. She approached the TV, blocking her father’s gaze. She turned it off.
“What’d you do that for?” he asked.
“What were you watching?”
“A gotdamned media circus is what.”
“What was it on?”
“Some kid.”
“What’d he do?”
“C’mon now. Why're you interrogating me?”
“What’d the kid do, dad?”
“He shot up a grocery store.”
“Did they say why?”
Becky’s father looked at her. Even in the dark room with the curtains drawn, a bit of daylight crept in through the cracks where the linnen wasn’t overlapping. Her father reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. He held it unsteadily, the tip bobbing up and down as he lit it.
“How come you don’t just watch it with me?” he said.
Kathy looked around the smoke-filled darkness. She shook her head.
“I can’t do it. I can’t.”
They both stared at the black screen. Becky’s father reached for the remote in his lap. Hit the power button. A flood of light. Becky winced.
