Things I tell LiveWire

I touched a dead person today.

Not even a dead person. A dead thing. A shell of a thing.
A cold, stiff shell of a thing.
The cold, stiff shell of a mother.
A shell of a mother with lazy, milky eyes and I wanted to close her eyes but she'd been dead too long. So long.

It wasn't her. I'm going to find out it was all a trick. That it was an elaborate wax sculpture. Even a robot. So the woman that didn't recognise me last night and panicked in that small, sterile room wasn't my mother, but a decoy, while she makes her real escape. The robot wouldn't let me get close enough to tell it I loved her because I would see the lights behind her eyes, and hear the whirs of her gears beneath ample skin. No, no. Ample latex and prosthetics.
It wasn't her and when we cremate her, it won't be her, and when I am going to be given ashes to have with me, it won't be her. I will search through them with my fingers for a stray bolt. A lost wire.
It won't be my mother they feed to that insatiable fire. It will be her decoy. The decoy that lay on her back with her hands folded over her swollen belly, a belly that seemed to squirm and writhe with something alien that hijacked her body. Held her at laser point and made her surrender. That broke her down every day. Writhing things that made light harsh, bones grind and that made the drugs not work.
Did she escape from them? Is that what she did? Or did they make off with her, leaving a stiff-but-soft alien decoy in her place? What will they do to her? Maybe she will come home. She will swing in on a vine like a heroine and things will go back to normal.
Maybe.

LiveWire have you ever touched a dead person?

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she had a heart like a pomegranate laid open to the world.

Things I told LiveWire on the 27th of August, nearly a month to the day ago. A month to the day, and a year and a month to the day that we bought the beautiful house she loved so.

I miss my mother, because days like this I know she would be the only one to tell me what's right. Or at least call me a slut or something, just anything. I'd give anything.