In the living room, when everyone else is asleep, the mother drowns herself in YouTube tragedy videos: natural disasters, cave diving accidents, remarkably violent murders. She doesn’t care about the mysteries or the killers’ motivations, it’s enough to know that blood was drawn, that foolish, innocent people left their beds one day and never returned to them. She leans forward, on these nights, the glow of the TV screen rippling down her wan, tired face.
Most deaths, she knows, are contemptuously boring: hospice and heart attacks and cancer caught too late. She longs for a meteor, a sinkhole, a murder of passion. A car, gaining speed, crashing into her living room and killing her on impact while her children sleep noiselessly in their bedroom down the hall. Even better if she has the strength to move after the crash, to wander out of the opening that this car has created and scurry off, elsewhere, to die.
One day, she tells herself, she’ll really do it. She will abandon her bathrobe and her mortgage payments and find herself a death worthy of conversation. On the screen, an animation shows a man falling headfirst into a woodchipper, and the mother’s mouth goes dry with envy.
