“Is this yours, sir?” the police officer asked, standing on the front porch of the Watkins home. He gestured behind himself with a casual flick of his thumb.

Darryl Watkins, 48-year-old father of two, wearing a threadbare robe and a pair of thin-soled slippers, stood in the relative safety of his front door and blinked in the early morning light. “Excuse me?”

“Does she belong to you?” the officer asked again.

Darryl peered past the police man’s bulky frame and looked toward the street. A cold wind tickled at his ankles. For a moment, in his sleep-addled state, he couldn’t tell what the policeman was referring to. The only objects within his immediate line of sight were the barren expanse of tarmac that served as their driveway and the officer’s own squad car. It was only as he gazed a little more intently at the vehicle that he noticed the figure sitting in the rear seat.

“Ah, yes,” he muttered. “I guess that’s mine.”

The policeman nodded with disinterest, his attention already focused on his logbook, a cheap ball-point scratching ineffectively across the page. “Very good, sir, now if you wouldn’t mind signing here,” he said. He passed Darryl the pad and reached for his radio. “Yeah, he says she’s his, Nikki. You wanna hop out and open the door for her?”

Darryl accepted the logbook, awkwardly pinning his robe against his chest with an elbow as he scribbled his signature, his eyes dimly registering a second officer as she stepped out of the squad car and moved toward the rear door.

Handing back the pad, he looked up in time to see a huge puffer jacket, Antarctic-grade, waddle up to them, wisps of hair dangling haphazardly from the hood. The escorting officer, a slim woman with kind eyes, gave him a sympathetic smile before heading back to the car.

“She was picked up at the ferry terminal,” her partner, still on his doorstep, said. “Was asking for a ride on the first ship heading to the pole. Ticket clerk called it in.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“This is the fifth call out we’ve had this month, Mr. Watkins. Far be it from me to tell you how to look after your family, but you might want to keep a bit of a closer eye on this one. You understand?”

Darryl nodded sheepishly, hugging his robe in tight across his chest. “Yes, I will, thank you.”

The officer stared at him a moment and then stepped down off the porch, dipping his cap to the figure in the puffer jacket. “There you are, safe and sound, ma’am. You have a good day now.”

“I am just going outside and may be some time!” the puffer jacket replied.

The policeman glanced back at Darryl and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s uh, the last words of Captain Oates, polar explorer,” Darryl said. “Just a little something that she, well, um….”

“I see,” the officer said, a mild frown creasing his brow, before turning to his car.

Darryl stepped aside to let the puffer jacket shuffle past him into the hallway, then watched the squad car reverse out of his driveway. He waved gratefully to the policemen as they exited onto the street.

By the time he returned to the kitchen, the puffer jacket had already dumped itself unceremoniously at the table and his wife was switching on the kettle. A yawn stretched across her face.

“Constable Donaldson again?” she asked, walking over to give him a peck on the cheek and his arm a reassuring stroke.

“No,” he said, “a new pair. Should have offered them a cup of tea. Wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s not even 6 a.m. yet, I think you can be forgiven a lapse. I’m sure you’ll remember next time.”

“Next time? Are we just accepting that it’s inevitable now?”

His wife gave him a comforting smile, squeezed his biceps, and moved to get the cups.

“What about you?” he asked the puffer jacket. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

The figure in the jacket turned toward him. His mother’s cloudy eyes peered out from inside the fur-lined hood. “I am just going outside!” she barked.

Rolling his eyes, Darryl flopped into a chair at the head of the table and ran his hands through his hair. Already he felt the river of hot guilt trickle down his spine. It wasn’t his mother’s fault. On a logical level, he knew that.

The woman was almost 80 years old, and dementia had slowly stripped out every recognizable part of her. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t even understand where she was the majority of the time, or who she was speaking to. She was simply wandering through life, dazed and confused. She couldn’t be held responsible for her own actions.

But sometimes it all became too much. She was supposed to be the parent. She was supposed to be the one looking out for him, helping him to raise his family, providing him with an extra pillar of support, being there for him as someone he could lean on when he needed it most.

Worst of all, he felt as though his memories of her were being tainted. The happy images of her from his childhood, his early adult life, were all slowly being painted over by the shell of a person that she’d become. Where had she gone, the loving, vibrant woman of his youth? Where too the adventurous, fun, quick-witted parent of his adolescence? Why did they have to leave? How could they let this mere afterimage take their place?

He knew he shouldn’t think such things.

She’d never asked for this, and had certainly never done anything to invite it.

Still.

“Take a breath,” his wife said. She placed a steaming cup in front of him. “Just breathe.”

“It’s just….”

“I know.” She leaned over him, hugging her chest against his back. “I know.”

“It’s like she’s not my mother anymore. Rather, this stranger walking around in her cast-off skin, like she’s wearing her.”

Across the table, a shrunken hand snaked out of an oversized sleeve and snagged the handle of her teacup, the fingers dragging the piece of crockery toward the hood for inspection.

“That jacket. She used to wear that with pride. ‘One of the first women to live and work in Antarctica,’” Darryl said, mimicking the mother of his memory’s old jubilant tone. “Now, it’s become this weird window into someone else’s life. She’s slipped it on and refuses to take it off, just wants to pick up where this former version of herself once was, jump on a ship, run off to the pole.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Not that bad? We’re talking about something that happened fifty years ago. From before I was even born.” His hand twitched spasmodically, fighting against the growing frustration and annoyance. “It’s like her mind’s stuck on a snapshot.”

The kitchen was quiet, his wife holding him statue-still. Muted sips crept from inside the puffer jacket’s hood.

“And is that so wrong?” his wife asked. “Would you rather she just sat in her chair all day, staring out the window?”

Darryl shook his head, pulling his wife’s arm from across his chest. “What are you talking about? You’ve never said anything like this before.”

His wife backed away from him, retrieving her own cup from the counter. “I’m simply saying, you’re right. We’re looking at your mother’s condition as this inevitable thing, this dark cloud that hovers over our lives while we wait for the next time. Maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe instead of looking at the cloud, we should be looking for the silver lining.”

“You want to look for the silver lining in dementia?”

“Yeah, kinda. What I mean is we’re only focusing on the negatives, and it’s not going to change anything. It’s certainly not going to do us any good. So, maybe we should be thinking more about the positives. Your mother is active, outgoing, and constantly meeting new people. Things could be worse.”

For a second he simply looked at her.

He knew he was upset, that his thoughts regarding his mother were always liable to put him in a dark mood. He knew he was tired, that both of them were up far earlier than either one of them truly cared to be. He also knew that given the strain of their ongoing situation, what was required at all times was a clear head, a calm demeanor, and ample leeway.

Which is how he understood that if he opened his mouth, if he allowed the words he was thinking to slip past his lips, he was going to regret them. But still, with the surging mess of emotions dancing on his tongue, the urge to do so was overpowering.

“That has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” he said.

His wife’s expression shifted from surprised to hurt to angry in an instant. It was the perfect illustration of how he felt about himself in that moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to her. “I didn’t mean that.”

She held up her hands, warding him away. “You know what?” she said, a familiar aura of barely restrained irritation sweeping across her features. “Forget it. It’s early. The kids will be up soon. I have better things to do with my day than listen to you wallow in misery and pessimism and refuse to even consider alternative options. We’ll talk later.”

“Honey, come on, I’m sorry,” he called after her as she left. But he made no move to stand from the table; in his experience, when his wife said she wanted to be left alone the best thing to do was exactly that. Unfortunately, this had become their new normal, and the prime instigator was still sitting across from him.

“You’ve nothing to say?”

The hood of the puffer jacket twitched, a cloudy eye peering out at him from the dark recess. “I am just going outside!” she cried.

“Figured,” he replied.

They sat in silence, Darryl’s mind wandering in dark and morbid directions.

“You know,” he said, in the general direction of the puffer jacket, “there’s a word in the English language that specifically refers to the killing, suicide, or abandonment to the death of the elderly. Senicide.”

He cocked his head and peered toward the hood. “Isn’t that neat? We have one for killing kings, popes, gods…even languages. Makes sense we’d have one for killing the elderly, don’t you think?”

The puffer jacket said nothing, merely sat silently beside him, no doubt thinking its own jumbled thoughts, considering its own convoluted world.

“In ancient Rome,” Darryl continued, “there was a proverb stating that sixty-year-olds were to be thrown from a bridge. Now, some people say that this was a metaphor referring not to their killing but rather to the removal of their right to vote. However, don’t you think the literal translation is so much more pleasing? Doesn’t it conjure a far more aesthetic image to your mind’s eye? Togas rippling in the wind, limbs flailing, masonry blurring past….”

He paused, a dim part of his mind screaming that this was wrong. He shouldn’t be saying such things, especially not to his own mother. What was he doing? Sure, she’d lost some parts of herself along the way, but she was still the woman who had raised him.

“Then there were the Heruli, a Germanic tribe,” he said, ignoring the internal voice. “They used to place their elderly atop a pile of wood, stab them to death, and then set the pyre alight. Can you imagine? The touch of the heat across your skin? The smell, tickling at your nostrils?”

He leaned forward, dipping his nose over his cup, and drew in a long slow breath, the warmth of the vessel radiating toward his upper lip.

“In Japan, they were far less macabre,” he continued. “They preferred to carry their elderly to the mountainside and simply abandon them there. The custom came to be known colloquially as ‘granny dumping.’”

He sat back again and giggled, childlike.

“It sounds rather charming when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Granny dumping. As if you’re just visiting the local trash heap or recycling centre, disposing of some of the excess clutter around your home, don’t you think?”

The puffer jacket said nothing, its blank gaze locked toward the bland surface of the kitchen table.

Somehow, her silence irritated him more. It was irrational, he knew, but could she not even get angry at him anymore? Not necessarily as a son, but as a perfect stranger? Could she not muster the will to defend herself, to speak out, to do anything? What was he to her now? A mere speck of jetsam in the background swirl of fog that filled her head? Was that it?

For all the pain and suffering she caused him, for all the upheaval and angst, for all the untold graft and strain that he had been forced to suffer through, was he simply a nothing to her?

“And then, of course, as you know,” he said, “we have the Inuit. When it was their time, they were simply escorted out onto the ice, left to freeze, and have nature run its course.”

The puffer jacket crooked toward him, cloudy eyes gaping out at his leering smile from between the fur.

“I am just going outside and may be some time!” she bellowed, flecks of saliva flicking onto his cheek with the force of her proclamation.

“I know!” he screamed. He stomped to his feet, slamming his hands into the kitchen table, his nerves so frayed he gave no thought to his wife or children in the rooms above. “You and your bloody Captain Oates, with his last goddamn wo—.” His words skittered to a halt.

He blinked a couple of times, processing, the thought rolling through his mind.

“His last words…” his said. “Captain Oates’ last words. His final utterance to his teammates before he stepped outside into the Antarctic blizzard, walking willingly to his death.”

His mother stared back at him fixedly, the vacant look of dementia flickering in her eyes. “I am just going outside,” she repeated, the words slow and deliberate.

Darryl brought his hands to his face, rubbing at his cheeks, clawing them over his scalp. “I always thought you were stuck in the past, chasing shadows of adventure, latching on to the figure of Oates, but….”

“I am just going outside,” the puffer jacket said again. She turned away from him and focused on her cup.

Darryl took a shaky step from the table, Antarctic chills running up his spine, his feet trembling.

Was that her? Truly her? His mother? Had he actually witnessed a rare moment of clarity, of focus, in which she had been able to rally her faculties and direct her will? To ask for death?

No, no, no, no, no. He swallowed, shaking his head. That was nuts. His mother had never given any signs of having suicidal thoughts before….

Or at least, none that they’d noticed.

And if she’d had them, would she have shown them? Or would she have concealed them, like most people do?

Maybe she did, until it was too late to hide them any longer, but her mind had unravelled too much for her to be able to ask for that which she desired.

Was that what she had been wanting all this time? All these years, wandering off in her puffer jacket, trying to find passage to the pole, quoting Oates…had she merely been trying to die?

Darryl gripped his fingers behind his head, his arms tightening round his neck as he squeezed. The pressure helped to distract him from the pounding pain that had begun to grow in the base of his skull.

The conclusion swept over his brain, goading his neurons, stroking over his synapses. It seemed so logical, so beautiful, so perfect.

His car keys were right there, staring at him from the kitchen counter. If he drove out to the middle of nowhere, stripped her naked, left her there, they’d never question it. Her wanderings were well documented. She’d be out of their hair. He’d be doing her a favor. It was what she wanted, yes?

But a voice at the back of his head screamed, “What if you’re wrong? What if you’re just imagining what you want to hear?”

“I am just going outside and may be some time,” the puffer jacket muttered.

David Whitaker is originally from the UK though has traveled around a bit and now resides in India. He has a degree in journalism, however decided that as he’s always preferred making things up it should ultimately become a resource rather than a profession. His stories, covering everything from sci-fi to philosophy, have been published across the globe and links to each can be found at wordsbydavid.com. Twitter: @wordsbydavid