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Cordelia

It used to fascinate her, the way each Sunday on the way to preach at chapel he'd pop a polo in his mouth to hide the taste of the whisky it was a sin to drink. She'd watch his neck from the back of the car and think, 'Without you, I would not be born. Without you, I would die. You gave me all."
         Forty years later, Lear-like, his body ruined and his mind in even worser state, nurses point him out to her and say: Look on him. Look on his lips. Look, look there.
         In the first days of his fever he catalogued the world, and litanised all the names he'd ever known and never once did he call on or acknowledge her , except to whine and spit when she came near.
         Now he lies near to coma, his eyes closed, lips set, mind closed, intent on nothing else. He has not eaten for ten days, and she has refused to let them pipe food into his stomach or his veins. Why? What‘s there left for him to live for? If he's dead to such questions, why must she sit by his bed and have to answer them?
         She has a life - one made against his will. What he called sin, she has called independence. She'd wake some mornings, mouth furred, foul with wine and a stranger's kisses.; a little water and some toothpaste cleansed her of her such deeds. How, she thought, could it be sin: it was flavoured mint?
         His sometime daughter, fair Cordelia? Goneril or Regan were better parts And he had not given all, had given nothing - nothing of value anyway: she has bowed under its zero weight for years. Cordelia would never have left France.
         Night time, she leans reluctantly to go and kisses him. His saliva glitters. His dentures grin white in the ward's near dark. When he's dead and buried, these teeth will scent the coffin's unnecessary air. By his grave, she will tell herself she smells the Steradent mingling with the lilies, and death will seems a sin as bad as whisky.