Animal Husbandry
By Grace Magee
“So, Mrs. O’Capall, you have Parkinson’s.”
“What?” She asked.
“Your walk.” The doctor gestured to her whole body, “The second you came in, I could see your walk.”
Suddenly deeply embarrassed, Mrs. O’Capall spent the rest of the appointment with her hands in her lap, staring at the wall. The thing she had spent weeks agonising about in silent contemplation was so obvious to everyone else that it was not only seen on her face, but her arms, her legs, the shape of her spine. The doctor, faceless, young, ugly in his handsome banality, hadn’t even been shocked. He hadn’t thought it was anything newsworthy. He must see a hundred stupid old women every day.
“I just wasn’t sure, you know, I’ve not got the shakes—”
“Oh, Parkinson’s doesn’t cause tremors. That’s the medicine,” he said, not looking up from his computer. “Parkinson’s actually causes the body to atrophy. The medicine works to keep your muscles limber. But it does cause shaking.”
Of course. How silly of her.
He talked through the rest of the symptoms: slowness, depression, lack of balance, memory problems. He had not mentioned the teeth.
Mrs. O’Capall had lost most of her teeth years ago—the babies had sucked the calcium out of her in the womb—but now her gums were swollen and tender and bleeding. Her adult teeth had come in nearly sixty years ago, but she never forgot the feeling of gums coming away in slices to reveal newly breached bone. She ran her tongue over the welts in the front of her mouth where the new teeth were emerging.
She felt like a baby all over again. She cried all the time. She had a headache that she could never shift. Hopefully now that the new teeth were rent bare, it would ease. But molars typically don’t grow up front. The blunt, flat tips were unmistakable. They were so big, it only took a few of them to fill the gaps. This changed the whole shape of her jaw and lips. Soon, she threw her dentures out. She didn’t have to worry about chewing her food, because it was all served to her mushed now.
“What should we do with the farm?” She could hear her daughters debate it in whispers on the stairwell. “It’s falling to pieces, she can’t keep up.”
“She won’t go to a home,” one of them sighed. “And we could look into getting some help out here, but what’s that going to run us? My twins are going into nursery soon, I can’t afford—”
“Why can’t mum use her own money?”
“Well, we don’t want to burn through it.”
“I can’t keep driving all the way out here. It took me an hour just to clean up her dinner today after the mess she made.”
“Now, that’s not fair. She can’t help that.”
“I know, I know. But she’s being so stubborn about this, making us do it. There are people trained for this.”
People paid for this.
Mrs. O’Capall leaned against the doorframe to her bedroom, her fingers falling onto the grooves carved into the side.
Tara, 12, 5’2”. Joseph, 4, 3’4”. Aileen, 9, 4’8”.
The headaches didn’t subside when her teeth stopped coming in. In fact, they worsened.
Her husband had been a joiner, modern word for a carpenter, and one day he’d explained to her how axes really work. What she remembered the most vividly from that night were the smells: the sawdust floor of his workshop, the cold metal of the hammers and nails, the old wood roof that’d swollen after years of Armagh rain. Smells she could only convince herself she’d once experienced, as the Parkinson’s had taken that sense from her too.
“It’s not the sharp of the blade that splits the wood,” he said as he took her hand in his. He put her finger on the tip of the axe’s blade so gently, “that just nicks the wood, ya see? The splitter is this thick part here, it’s the bit. See the curve in the steel? It’s what actually forces the wood apart.” He showed her each part of the axe and spoke their names: toe, throat, belly, shoulder, butt, eye, heel, cheek. This axe was his other woman, his companion on the job. He stroked it, and then he stroked her. She smiled hard, unable to stop, thrilled to be part of his special secret male world, if only for a moment on one frosty evening.
Now, she felt the headache work the same way. The teeth had been the initial contact, the edge of the blade making the first indent. Now, the axe was being forced down, hard, the bit slowly pushing her skull further and further apart. The shape of her face was changing. It was longer, broad at the top, and tapered at the end. Her nose grew to match her newly shaped mouth. Her ears were longer at the top. Hairy, too. So were the whiskers coming out of her nose.
“Ma, you look the same as you’ve always done,” her son said as he clumsily helped her out of his car one day, “Didn’t the doctor say you might feel weird on the meds? That’s all this is.”
Of course. What would she know about her own body? Her whole life had been a series of not knowing what it was doing; from periods, to sex, childbirth, menopause, and now this. She was always told to trust her instincts, her nature, her doctors. Always trusting things on the outside, things she couldn’t touch or understand. She could put her two hands on each side of her head and not trust what she had under her fingers.
Her son’s hand hovered over her, never touching her unless she got spooked, stumbled, or careened off the path. Even then his touch was reluctant, scared he might catch what she’s got.
Mrs. O’Capall dreamed she was at the edge of a puddle. It was clear bog water, sitting on top of the swamp moss and grass. Silver mist surrounded her on every side. Even though it was probably only a few inches, she couldn’t step in. Who knew how deep it went?
She woke that morning to a disconcerting feeling. She was faced to the far wall, but she could see the window out of her right eye, in the opposite direction. She sat up fast and, feeling dizzy, flopped down on the bed, then sat up again, pushing herself up on her arthritic elbows. The world was moving in two lanes of traffic, in parallel directions. She could see in front of her, but also on both of her sides, like her peripheral vision had expanded. When she got to her mirror, her mouth fell open in awe. Her eyes were huge and dark and had migrated to her temples. Her tall ears were further up, their lobes now level with the top of her new eyes. Colours had changed too. Mrs. O’Capall lifted her best lipstick to the light and turned it every which way, but it was grey by all accounts. The blue cylinder it was in, however, stayed as it was the day her husband had given it to her.
She could feel something she couldn’t name, like a red hot thorn had been pulled out of her, one she hadn’t realised was there until it was gone.
She looked out the window over the land. The sun was just coming up.
The doctor had said “atrophy.” They pulled a bog body out of the land near the farm once. All that was left was an arm and some torso, so perfectly preserved they could see every line in every fingernail. They’d said it’d been atrophied “perfectly,” wonder in their eyes. Bizarre that the same word could be used so positively and so negatively for two different women who had lived in the same village.
She realised what the strange feeling was—the headache had stopped. She set the lipstick back down. It was nearly done anyway.
Trotting down to the back of her land, she stopped briefly by her husband’s old workshop to pick up his shotgun. The other woman was hanging from the ceiling hook, still waiting on her man to come home after all these years. The twin light of the sinking moon and the rising sun bounced off its blade, winking at her. She brushed its metal softly with her fingertips, shut the door behind her, and went out to pasture.
Grace Magee is an Irish writer based in Belfast city. She’s been published in Awkward Middle Children and on BBC Radio Ulster.