Old Mold

Sam Fogel

The digital clock peeking through the orange bottle tells him it’s Saturday, the 24th of October; his son’s birthday. Frank takes another swig of water.

Old knees brace to stand in a way that’s bent at the back. Then his gaze is sent to the floor, watching feet shuffle the length of a minute to the foot of the bed. As a hand slides the mirror door, opening up the right side closet, he holds himself up with the other hand against the wall. From inside the closet, he grabs at his robe, single-handedly manipulating it off its hook, causing the metallic wire to swing wildly. He steadies it before covering himself up in
the same frayed, thin grey fabric he’s worn for the past 10 years. He has only a few pairs of shoes, some walking shoes and some meant for a classier outer appearance. They were all fine shoes except for the scuffs, dirt, and rips that pollute them. These days, he does not try to mend them—most are too far beyond repair—although every time he slides the closet open, he’s disappointed in himself. One pair, specifically, stands out above the rest. They were a
light, leafy green of smooth suede when his wife had bought them for him—

“Don’t make them look like all your other shoes.”

But now they hide in the closet in muddy color, stained deeply, crusted by the puddles he’d stepped in months before. Looking down carves a scowl on his face; he regrets the state of these shoes above all others.

Behind the meticulous curtain of worn-out clothing and perfect arrangement of spent shoes are stacks and stacks of books and boxes piled high.

“Dad? Why do you keep so many things?”

He stares past the boxes’ walls to the full journals inside and forgets his next breath.

“Our boy’s a writer, Frank! Look at all his journals!”

The mirror door grumbles back to a close. He refuses the silver cane waiting against his dresser as he
hobbles down the hall to the bathroom. In exchange, he promises to take all of his vitamins and the rest of
his medication.

“You better, you old fart.”

He smirks at that. His wife is a hoot.

At the turn of a corner, onto cold tiles, he suddenly faces himself: cavernous eyes, and puffy red and purple bags beneath thick, bushy grey brows, surrounded by a vast denseness of creases on the surface of yellow skin—he’s exhausted. He runs his gaze over to the drain amid a pool of porcelain. It supplies a distorted kind of reflection which is, in a strange way, much more inviting. Only after the creak of rotating hinges is he allowed to look up. More translucent-orange cylinders plus white and black labeled bottles containing various amounts and kinds of pills take up the whole of three shelves. Most are for his dying liver, others for diminishing sight, weakening muscles, and increasing blood pressure. There’s a single bottle of kidney medication lying on its side in solitude on the highest shelf. His
back lengthens as he fixes the bottle to stand upright. Olin, Cheryl is typed on the label.

“Stop stalling and take them already.”

Moving from right to left, he begins with the pills for his eyes and works his way down to those for his liver. Between each round of twisting lids and shaking pills into hand, onto tongue and flushing them down, a glass cup smacks onto the ceramic of the sink’s edge. A short break comes with a rush of water refilling the cup, then the process continues.

His stomach is unnaturally full and empty at the same time.

“Eat.”

He wades through the home in automatic movement—a husk of himself—and then he’s in the kitchen. There’s
nothing much in the fridge: simple applesauce, wheat bread, cottage cheese that’s been there too long, a chocolate bar, orange juice, soy milk; and the picture still resting inside the closed butter compartment. That smooth, familiar face that made shadowed, sagging eyes seem out of place assaulted Frank’s mind daily. Even in the corner of his eyes, out of focus—even from the next room with the refrigerator closed—he still felt the wrench twist inside his stomach, the constriction in his airways like the pills that would clog his throat and leave a bad taste in his mouth. Memories of his son crept behind him, loomed over him and pulled him into forgotten rooms of his being, so he kept his picture there, pre­served in the cold, behind a closed door.

Today, Frank will have to face his son.

The smell of mold invades his senses as the plastic container of cottage cheese pops open and tips into the trash. Milky, watery chunks of fuzzy gray and green and black, with only hints of white, splash in bunches onto the garbage below. Hearing the slap of clumpy liquid and smelling the pungent sourness, the spoil pollutes his mouth. It’s too nauseating. He doesn’t eat.

In the living room, he staggers past piles of news­papers, electrical cords and wires, dated computers, hard drives and keyboards, mugs, silverware, and miscellaneous things all in perfect category, sectioned on either side of a straight path to a large, reclining chair in front of the tv. The newspapers take up more space than anything else in the house. Frank has kept every day since his son’s death, though it makes him more comfortable to think he collects them for their puzzles. He places today’s paper on top of the right stack. Crosswords are his favorite. It’s simple: there’s
always a right answer, no matter the time it takes to find it, and then, the payoff—the high of success, of
solving any problem they challenged him with.

“I knew it! Right on the money.”

“Wow, you’re real good at those, Dad!”

He can’t do his puzzles today. His head aches and he can’t keep a decent focus. The space is crowded—“you’ve got a problem, Frank.” Every line of sight is congested with objects. So many different parts and pieces, plastics and glass and ceramics and papers and wooden bits; but there still doesn’t seem to be enough. They don’t intrigue him like they used to—“Dad? Why do you keep so many things?”—they don’t distract him and, even worse, he sees right through them. He is a small, hunched over, shaking figure in a warehouse of useless, meaningless things, and he fits amongst them perfectly. They cave in on top of him, smother him in an emptiness he can’t explain, and he finds himself stuck, allowing dust to layer on the house of his shoulders. They are old things; used up, broken.

“They belong in the trash.”

She’s right.

He thought he was saving them from some terrible end; that each tangible piece held a value worth sacrificing the openness of his home. But they’ve been dead for some time. Now, they are like a fungus which spreads to everything close and, too late, Frank knows he is surrounded. The moist hair­iness of forest colors tangle within the frieze carpet, creep along the mirrors, through the pantries and in the fridge, swallowing everything with a persistence Frank cannot fight. Mold grows to contain his body, consuming the rest of his energy, and only his eyes are left clear enough to see what has become of him.

A couple years back, Cheryl had warned him about his current state. He had sat snuggled in his favorite recliner, protected by the brown cushions that cradled him. His resiliently beautiful wife of five long decades, had stood facing him. Her sturdy figure cut off his view of the tv.

“What do you want me to do?” Frank said.

“I want you to get rid of all this junk.”

The wrinkles around her mouth seemed to outline the words as if emphasizing her point. Although they had been together for so long, he knew she’d grown to resent his compulsive hoarding. When they were younger, he would joke that he “just loved everything too much to give it up” and she used to laugh at that.

“It’s not in the way, is it?”

“What are you on about? There’s hardly any space for
me,” she said.

Fully dressed now, wearing his nicest pair of shoes, he waits at a safe distance from the front door. Frank wishes he could hide under the covers of his bed and say that he’s too ill. But he has only himself to lie to and he can hear Cheryl saying that it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. With a readying breath, he takes his cane and wades through his resistance into the outside.

Across the street from his house, there’s a family who his wife knew the names of playing on their front lawn. She had reminded him of their names many times, but he hadn’t cared much to remember. The little girl, as tall as a hydrant, is tracing wild patterns in the grass faster than Frank thought her stubby legs could’ve taken her. Her mother gives an exaggerated chase of short yet quick steps with her arms reaching out for her daughter.

“I’m gonna get you,” the mother sings.

As he is traveling along the sidewalk before their property, a ridiculously high-pitched squeal comes from the little girl and then she laughs and the sound of her happiness dances through the air like the warm, full, smell of the bagel shack he used to live next to as a boy. Its charm clouds Frank’s senses and takes away his ability to go any further. The two of them are disgustingly bright, painful to look at like staring up into the center of the sun. He hates that he can’t
look away. Their game goes on for a few seconds more and then the girl glances behind her, tiny feet slow down, and she allows herself to be caught up in the affection of her mother’s arms. There is no distance between them. Their closeness brings a chill over his body and his wrinkled, weak right hand grows strong around the crown of his cane. Mother and daughter seem unbelievable, like characters in a movie. He stands as an audience sitting in an empty theater measuring the camera, the cities, the screen, and the rows of seats between him and them. When they notice him, they immediately right themselves and retreat their happiness. Both of them are looking straight at him, only a few feet from him. The little girl leans her face behind her mother’s hair and he thinks about how old and tired and pitiful he must look. She’s not smiling anymore and he knows he should leave, but then the mother whispers something soft to her child and the girl lifts her head, raises her chubby hand and waves gently.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Olin,” the woman says.

There’s an awkwardness in his movements as he is jostled from his place in the audience. He wishes he were see-through; unnoticeable. But now he has a role to play through their eyes. He sees them expecting, waiting for him to respond, posed in guarded anticipation. What should he do? Cheryl would know what to say. Her voice is the friendliest Frank has ever known. If he spoke, he knew he wouldn’t be as sweet. He nods, not bothering to get their names, and turns away from them towards the cemetery.

The sky is already bleeding into the evening. By the time Frank reaches his son, it will be too dark for his old eyes to make out the engraved letters of his name on the headstone. He carries himself down the street under the gaze of a receding sun.

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