Prompt: Write a story featuring an elder

As I looked at the woman sitting across from me in the discolored blue chair, I realized I’d fully detached myself from her. My chest tightened and my throat closed at the realization, but I knew it was true. I was sitting across from a stranger with no distinct feeling of affection. And I didn’t know when it had happened.

She had been mercurial for years and there were signs of course that her mind was slipping just past her reach, but I don’t think it was until she hit me, screaming, that I stopped seeing the woman in front of me as my mother. I’d cried as her fists rained down, not from the force of her impact but from my own disbelief. I didn’t recognize her and I didn’t recognize my own anger. I wanted more than anything to shake her with force and make her to go back to the woman I knew and loved. But instead, I restrained her until she grew tired and the ambulance arrived. She shrieked with fear as the nurses came inside and I waited until I left her hospital room late that night to let myself succumb to my own sobs.

She stared through me now, as if I were an apparition.

Her hair, brittle and unruly resembled something close to cotton candy, nested on the top of her head. Her complexion was translucent and I stared at the blue veins pressing up against her paper skin. Her eyes were the only thing that looked the same as how I remembered from before she had changed, but even they had lost their light, taking on a dull quality that felt at odds with their piercing blue color.