I AM THE OLD MAN IN THE SEA -SHORT FICTION

Untitled Part 1

My paddle slices through the frigid water, sending icy spray into my face. It doesn't matter that it is 5 degrees Fahrenheit outside or that half of Washington County is looking for me. This is where I belong.

"Dad, we can't let you go out on Grand Manan Channel," My controlling daughter Barbra had told me the last time we were together. I regret raising a daughter like her. Joanne and I thought we were clever as we gave our oldest daughter, Barbra, authority in our home, helping us raise our other eight kids. I appreciated having Barbra take over the care of Joanne during the last three years of my lovely wife's life. But now, Barbra thinks she can bully me and tell me what to do.

I hated how she had peered down her wirerimmed glasses at me, looking and sounding like a rooster, as her hands flayed across her hips. Perhaps she will start pecking at me. At least, that's what she mentally does.

"I will continue to do what I please." I tried to stand as my back tightened, sending an electric bolt of pain into all my muscles. I had to hide the grimace, or Barbra would pounce on it. I tried to straighten, but things didn't work right in my back. An excellent visit to the chiropractor would fix it. I put the weight on my right side and hobbled toward the door.

"Dad, stop! You are Ninety-two. You aren't twenty-two. Stop acting like it. Look, you can't even walk, yet you want us to let you kayak in the ocean every day. No way! Not happening!" Her words wrapped around my legs, heart, body, and soul like the chains of Jacob Marley, the ghost who tried to enchain Ebenezer Scrooge. Barbara sucked the living out of my life.

As Barbara lectured me, my eyes wandered to the untouched mystery goop and soggy Brussels sprouts on the plastic tray. The aid had left the 'food' in my tiny room, and I couldn't bring myself to eat it. That crap smelt a lot like dirty underwear. That old gal Mable, two apartments down, had told me I could order food from my phone, and people would deliver it to me. I would have to start doing that. Again, I looked at the institutional garbage food and was tempted to grab a handful and smear it into Barbra's overly-processed hair. Instead, I yanked my hearing aid out, chucked it at Barbra, and awkwardly dragged myself toward the door. The rough material of my corduroy pants rubbed against my chunky thighs, which had thickened over the last few years as I walked less and less.

Barbra's shrill, birdlike voice played in my head. "You want us to let you kayak."

-Let you kayak.

-Let you kayak!

The nerve!

It wasn't her choice. I didn't live with Barbra. She didn't have power of attorney over me. She couldn't order me around like she did her husband. Pour soul had no idea what he was getting into when he asked her to marry him 48 years ago. Or was it 49 years?

Nonetheless, it probably felt like a hundred years to him, being told about every move he could or couldn't make. I think I was good to Joanne. I gave her freedom. I missed her as I wobbled into my room and slammed the door.

I looked at the small room, hating everything about it. Joanne and I had a lovely home in Cutler, Maine, but I sold it to afford the assisted living I had to move her into.

"Just move in with Mom. She cries every night without you." Barbra carefully laid the trap, and I hadn't seen it.

"I will die if I live in a nursing home."

Barbara did her Hillary Clinton laugh. Honestly, if I hadn't attended Barbara's birth, I would have thought she was Hillary's long-lost twin. "It's an assisted living facility, not a nursing home. -So different. And you don't need to live here. You are doing it for Mom. Only while she needs you." Which was Barbra's code for saying, we will sell everything you have, and after mom dies, you will have nowhere to move and will be a permanent prisoner of the nursing home, AKA assisted living.