Fran

By Sean Tarjoto

Fran understood what needed to be done. Fran, decrepit and gray-haired, understood quite clearly. The house was a mess, and now there wasn’t a single willing person beside herself who would stop bawling, shut up, assume responsibility and move on. Difficult as it was, Fran’s old house was as old as Fran herself, and both were now suddenly alone with their painfully, undeniably, geriatric selves.

Cleaning ladies were difficult to understand. Fran, a veteran employee of the Ol’ Lady Housekeeping™ service had been difficult to believe. With her Windex bottle and every possible sort of modern dirt elimination hardware tool at her hipside, it was evident that while she may have been old, but she sure as hell wasn’t dead. Not at all, especially, now, as she eyed the walls like a general over a battlefield, forcing herself to inhale minimally under the smoke of injured bullet wounds, or rather, rotten food plates.

The living room was a deadly stench of formerly upholstered furniture, no longer commodious with fresh leather scent, but sliced with pennies and quarters galore. Meanwhile, part of her fortune had actually collected rust nearby the miscellaneous canned foods that found there way into the mysteriously petrified thing in the laundry room, where Motis the cat slept. Motis, a fat, unhealthy feline who every time went to lick herself clean, also seemed to get a short meal.

Dishes tenuously placed atop each other in an unstable tower of porcelain. The sink was triply busted and in need of (yet another) repair; by now the faucet, bent to the left, seemed to spew only streams of brown. Beside, numerous rags loitered among the twisted dishwasher rack whose hinges had snapped off somewhere in the dining room.

Fran dove a rubber glove into the bottom of the laundry sink and fished out an oily plate. She reminisced briefly how dinner usually ended up being eaten over the sink and then, dropped the plate back. Globules scattered across her face, and she frowned, disappointed, but determined.

She crept upstairs to fix the bedroom first. And smelled something odd. Probably dead. There were a few smooshed bugs over what seemed to be a plate of old meat. Unfinished dinner sat slanted atop the bedside table, where a flickering bulb briefly illuminated the unmade sheets which Fran had immediately thought of smoothing out.

If it weren’t for the fact Fran hadn’t understood so clearly, she wouldn’t have cleaned the house.