Short Story: Mrs. Edgeware

Mrs. Edgeware was a daft old bat of three-hundred-and-four. Today was her birthday.

Mrs. Edgeware wasn't sure how she had gotten to such a ripe old age - particularly considering she was no more ripe than a rotten, mushed banana. In fact, everything about Mrs. Edgeware was mushed banana: from her bright yellow, skin-tight gym gear (even though she hadn't been to the gym since the Battle of Waterloo) that flapped in the breeze as her flabby skin did, like a folded, mouldy purse; to her watery eyes that gushed like Niagara Falls, despite that she rubbed them constantly (and if she rubbed them any harder they might burst like a tomato); to her wattled stomach that made a perfect parachute whenever she stumbled near a cliff-edge (which due to her malevolent cataracts and poor driving skill was an oft occurrence - a daredevil was she); a banana also in her splitting sides.

The whole of Mrs. Edgeware was sagging, and if she sagged anymore, she might suffocate under her own parachute flesh and lie upon the floorboards like a fleshy carpet. Mrs. Edgeware seemed to be aware of this, and so she breathed with the aid of a gas canister, which injected oxygen up her backside - for she liked to ensure her lips were free for smooching her great-great-great-grandchildren who only visited at Christmas out of guilt and in the hope that Mrs. Edgeware might finally drop dead. Mrs. Edgeware had a massive will, you see. The prize was the key to her rusty soup can collection, whereas her millions were for charity - though the family did not know this. For Mrs. Edgeware cared little for money and thought it was worthless compared to love - if that love was for Heinz soup cans.

Mrs. Edgeware hoped for a birthday cake. She got one every year. Last year's had been in the shape of a coffin, and the year before that, and the past fifty years before that. Mrs. Edgeware always laughed at the coffin cake, thinking it was a joke rather than a threat (for she hadn't loved vampires since her tender years as Bram Stoker's personal aid.) Mrs. Edgware's laugh (if you could call it that) was like an old fart being released from a cheese-and-onion crisp packet, or the dusty wheeze of a vacuum cleaner's bag. It sent a chill down your spine rather than a sense of joy, as though Mrs. Edgeware's soul had finally levitated from her carcass. It was pointless giving Mrs. Edgeware a birthday cake anyway because her teeth had all fallen out in the early hundreds, and so she had to blitz her slices of cake in a blender and drink it through a straw. Even then, Mrs. Edgeware struggled to suck, so an air pump was fitted to rifle food down her gullet. They might as well have shoved another tube up her rickety bottom - it might have aided her incontinence by loosening some of the digested backlog clogged in her rotting intestines. As a result, Mrs. Edgeware stunk worse than a pigstye in a heatwave, and if you cut her open like her birthday cake, black sludge would ooze out like from a sewage pipe. Also, Mrs. Edgeware always insisted on birthday candles for her cake. More candle than cake. And the local fire department had to be on standby to help Mrs. Edgeware blow out her candles, or else the house was liable to burn down. One year, the team was deployed; they fired a hose at the cake to drench the flaming candles, and Mrs Edgeware, like the icing on the cake, splashed by the hose, melted: her waxy features slipped from her head like cheese on a barbecue. Her eldest great-grandson had managed to massage her features back together - an eye in the mouth and an eyebrow as a moustache. Mrs Edgeware didn't own a mirror and so hadn't noticed; she just assumed a caterpillar had taken a fancy to her rested below her dusty nose. Her great-grandson having been called on this act because, sadly, living forever doesn't run in the family, and the other little Edgewares had perished. It was strange to outlive your children, and Mrs Edgeware mourned whenever she could remember. For the most part, Mrs Edgeware still thought her children, Frank and Marie, were alive. Each Christmas she would knit her great-grandchildren a gaudy, three-armed jumper with the words Funk and Marya written on them (spelling wasn't Mrs Edgeware's strong point.) Nothing was Mrs. Edgeware's strong point, except her ability to sneeze her own eyeballs out - no-one was better at that than Mrs Edgeware. A sneeze that produced mature cheddar cheese mucus that peeled the paint off the walls of Mrs Edgeware's room, a dark room in an otherwise massive house that had collapsed around her in her neglect. Mrs Edgeware never went outside anymore, and she had all her curtains drawn - light scorched her, and so she sat in her dark room, festering in the mould spores and soup cans in a beaten leather chair that had been made from the pelt of the last buffalo in the American West. Mrs Edgeware had procured it during her adventures in the Wild West under the pseudonym of Sharpshooter Skye Shotgun. Skye Shotgun would ride out into the plains and hunt game and outlaws (even though she was an outlaw herself.) One time, she had killed a missionary because he had been smuggling counterfeit bonds in his Bibles. Oh, what a shot Sky Shotgun had been. What a woman Mrs Edgeware had been - although she could not remember these tales; rattling around in her brain was only the thought of Heinz chicken soup. Mrs Edgeware had found this love as Skye Shotgun. Coming East in the dying days of the West, Skye Shotgun had fallen in love with a nation's hero - the Heinz sauce company. They had been engaged in Skye Shotgun's mind, and had had little metallic factory babies (as Skye Shotgun had rolled in the gutter), and thus, the domestication of Skye Shotgun into Mrs Edgeware begun, and the days of adventure were consigned to the past. Now Mrs Edgeware could not have party-poppers for her birthday for the noise would rattle her cobwebbed mind and blow her head to the stratosphere, let along wield a shotgun, shooting bandits as she had done as Skye Shotgun. So, Mrs Edgeware was doomed to a tragic life of amnesia and yearning, for no-one was supposed to live as long as she; her mind could not retain its adventures...

Anyway, it was Mrs Edgeware's birthday. She was three-hundred-and-four. No-one came.