Delusional Eccentricity

There were beads of sweat dripping down her face. The pen kept sliding out of her fingers, dropping on the paper, and she would pick it up again. Her hand was trembling, shivering, as she scratched out nearly illegible words.

I remember her kitchen tap was broken, and there was a slow, steady trickle of water. Drop after drop. The tap leaked in rhythm with my aunt’s hand, as it reached the bottom of the page and tried to grasp another piece of paper. It dripped in rhythm with the words. It dripped to the same rhythm as the pen, every time it slipped away from her loose grip and made a thud on the table.

“She was delusional…” my brother says, “to make a long story short.”

His girlfriend leans over to him, her chin resting lightly on his shoulder. “But it doesn’t matter, that’s what they’re saying. Whether she was sane or not, this is what she decided.” She speaks lowly, her voice quiet and smooth, like a breeze in the early spring. He opens his mouth again, but she hushes him.

The executor’s lips are dry and shriveled. His eyes are wide, glimmering, seemingly glazed over; the reflection of the window as a perfect white square casts itself across his iris. Only his bottom lip moves when he speaks his slow words, and his yellow, crooked bottom teeth peek out from behind.

Aunt Marcella’s ancient grandfather clock stands next to the wall, its pendulum slowly swinging from the left to right, and back again. Its presence is remarkably notable, and somehow I am still thinking of it after I have tried to stop. The executor is interrupted by the nine o’clock chimes, and the clock plays its sorrowful melody – that one which my aunt loved so dearly – and the music drags itself through the room, weighing down the air, and for a moment each person seems much more dreadful than they have all morning. It carries on for much longer than anyone seems to want it to.

The wall to my left is close enough for me to smell its age. Dust drifts off of the grooves in the wallpaper and meets my nose, and it smells like someone, raised on the rainy streets of inner Europe three hundred years ago. The wallpaper itself is somewhat unconventional; there are different patterns on each of the walls, and they are very old, and very discoloured. That to my left was once a rosy pink – which I can only remember if I search the very deepest, most overlooked corners of my mind – but now the edges are peeling off the wall, and it is bleeding with a colour which most resembles yellow.

When I was much younger, I spent a lot of time with my aunt. Many people would say I spent too much time with my aunt. My father was an only parent and he would drop me off whenever he had to work; he would drive me over to this old, wooden, rotting house, and leave me on the doorstep, staring at me through the rear view mirror as he drove away. Sometimes my aunt wasn’t even home, so I would walk around the house to the backyard, where tall grass brushed against my stomach as I marched through, and I would sit myself down on the cool, lumpy soil, and I would talk to the squirrels until someone found me.

Marcella was eccentric by any objective view, and while she was difficult to understand, I liked her very much. She didn’t smile much, but she laughed a lot, in short, breathy exhales. She usually had the same plain, frightening look on her face, but I could tell when she liked something because she would raise her eyebrows and twitch a smirk. As long as I’d known her, I never saw her brush her hair, though it often seemed like she teased it just to make it look unkempt. She also smeared on black lipstick before she went anywhere, which would often smudge around her mouth or bleed the black colour onto her teeth.

The executor reads the last page of the Will, which is the only page that truly matters. The first few papers were words, written, splattered onto the page with no second thoughts. They were words describing her feelings and her life. Words, nearly indistinguishable from a story. Somewhere hidden among the words, though, folded away in the letters and the ink of the pen, was a hint that we wouldn’t like what was coming. The man begins to read it, through his cracked lips and crooked teeth; his voice seems to be choked out of him, his words choppy and raspy. “’I, Marcella Delarosa, am deciding – no, have decided long ago – that everything I own is going to my husband, Nathaniel Delarosa. My house, and everything in it, goes to my husband, Nathaniel Delarosa. My car, my bicycle, and my dear kitten Rochester, go to my husband, Nathaniel Delarosa. Everything to him. Oh, with the exception of my clothes. Those go to Luella Delarosa, because that damn girl never stopped talking about how much she loved my robes.’” The executor flips the page over. “Oh, she added something on the back. It says, ‘The rest of you, I have never cared about.’”

Most of the people in the room sit still, facing him, like rag dolls – arms hanging heavy at their sides, their chests moving rhythmically up and down. Those few who aren’t in some state of shock turn to face me. My cousin — Marcella’s brother’s daughter — squints at me first, then widens her eyes. “What the hell, Lulu? What the hell did you say to her?”

“I complimented her dresses,” I say. “They were nice.”

A few silent, heavy moments pass, before the room erupts. People stand up and begin talking at each other; people stand up and begin talking at me. I stare at them, hearing them, but not really listening. After a moment the executor raises himself from his seat, hushing everyone. “I know these are trying times,” he says, “but you must realise that this is what she wanted. I’m sure you all have

wonderful lives of your own and don’t need anything of hers.”

“That’s not the problem,” my brother snaps. The executor raises his eyebrows. My brother runs his hand through his hair, saying, “Her husband died. Like, eight years ago.” He then says, more quietly, “I said she was delusional.”

The executor nods, scanning over the paper once more. “Well, then, they had no children. Did Nathaniel have siblings?”

Someone says he had a brother.

“Well, then,” he repeats, “all of her belongings will, therefore, go to Nathaniel’s brother. Except for her clothes,” he says, looking at me.

-

A rainy fall afternoon, the leaves are burning shades of orange and burning shades of red, and they are soaked in water, and the ground is covered in them. The air smells like that distinguished earthy smell, of the first rainfall breaking a dry spell; it smells of the pleasant aromas accompanying rainfall and petrichor.

Streams of water tuck themselves into the corner of the road, up against the sidewalk, carrying limp leaves with them across the way. The umbrella above my head lets its black colour bleed into my vision. I smile at the black October sky; at the dark, heavy clouds, hanging lowly above me.

I slip my hand into the pocket of my dress, feeling the tough, warm cotton envelope my shivering fingers. My fingertips brush across something, which I pull out of the pocket. It’s a slip of paper, written in the same ink Marcella used as she scratched out the words of her Will.

Funny trick, wasn’t it? I damn hope their reactions were worth it.

My footsteps play a steady beat as they thump along the sidewalk.

I grin at the paper, sliding it back into my pocket. If she were there, she would have twitched a smirk.