Free Bonechiller by Graham McNamee Page A

maybe.
    Immortal
.

TEN
    It always catches me when I’m not expecting it.
    I’m getting out of the shower, toweling my hair dry. The mirror is cloudy from the steam. Reaching to wipe a patch clear, I see the marks where Dad has done the same thing earlier. The glass holds the print of his hand where he swiped away the steam.
    And just like that, the memories flood back, stopping my hand in midreach.
    It was something Mom used to do. She was always the early riser, the first to hit the shower. So when I’d get done with mine later on, sometimes I’d find one of her mirror doodles waiting for me. I’m a heat freak when it comes to showers, so she knew that when I got out I’d find the invisible finger drawings she’d made in the steam on the glass.
    She’d draw these stick figures with round lollipop heads. Dumb stuff, but it was
our
dumb stuff. We had a running thing with a stick figure called Stinkboy. My alter ego. Hewas the one who got mud on the carpet, left dirty laundry everywhere and was responsible for those foul sneakers. Mom drew the evil stick figure with pointy shark teeth, beady little eyes and wavy stink lines coming off him. Sometimes I’d add another stick figure to the scene, shooting tiny bullets at Stinkboy or stabbing him to death.
    Dumb stuff. Our stuff.
    I remember that the morning Mom showed the first sign something was wrong, I’d drawn a nuke attack on Stinkboy, surrounding him with little exploding mushroom clouds.
    “I think we’ve seen the last of Stinkboy,” Mom said, coming into the kitchen. “No way he can survive that.”
    I was nodding off into my cereal but snorted awake at the sound of her voice. “He’s been shot,” I mumbled. “Been stabbed, burned, bombed and decapitated. Still, he comes back. The guy’s immortal.”
    Mom was in her usual crazy rush, eating toast and chugging coffee while texting messages on her cell phone. She was a real estate agent, always racing around town showing places. Always with a million things on her mind.
    So it was almost funny at first. A slip of the tongue. She’d just downed her second black coffee and set the cup in the sink.
    “Toss me the elephant,” she said to me.
    “Huh?” I looked up from my cereal.
    “Elephant,” she said. “Elephant.”
    I just stared at her, frowning. She pointed to something on the table by my elbow. Her keys were lying there.
    “These?” I asked. “Your keys?”
    “Yeah. Toss them.”
    I did, and she caught them without even pausing in her texting. Mom was a master multitasker.
    “You said
elephant
.”
    “What’s that, honey?”
    “Just now, you said
Toss me the elephant
.”
    She glanced up from her cell, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t get it. What’s that mean?”
    “Hey, you tell me. You said it.”
    She gave me a look like I was talking crazy. “I think you must have inhaled one of those mushroom clouds meant for Stinkboy.”
    We shrugged it off. A slip of the tongue. It was almost forgotten by the time she did it again.
    More slips, getting words wrong. Kind of funny at first. Not so funny when the migraines started.
    She went in for tests. MRI, CAT scan, EEG.
    Aphasia
, they called it. Getting words wrong, forgetting the names of things. It was the first symptom, soon followed by the headaches, nausea, clumsiness and disorientation.
    Then they found
it
in the left hemisphere of her brain. The part that controls speech recognition, balance, memory. Mom said the image on the MRI scan made the tumor look kind of like an octopus, with tentacles reaching out, holding on. The biopsy showed it was bad. Its location, up against the brain stem, was worse.
    Then the real nightmare started.
    All this flashes through my head now as I’m standing here in front of the mirror.
    I use the towel to wipe the glass clear, and catch myreflection. My eyes are tearing up, and my heart feels like a fist inside my chest. A surge of panic rises.
    No! Not now. Not now.
    I shut my eyes tight, leaning on the