Woman, Eating

We only ever got pigs’ blood. This wasn’t because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. ‘Pigs are dirty,’ my mum said once. ‘It’s what your body deserves.’ But it turns out that pigs aren’t naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with

My mum coached me on how to lose friends when I was a teenager. She taught me how to drift out of other people’s lives so that they eventually stopped contacting me and forgot I existed. She taught me how to appear boring to friends, depending on what they were interested in, or how to act clingier than I really was so that the other person would b

Crimson Orchard recommends that residents have as many of their belongings – photos, books, furniture even, any personal artefacts – arranged around their rooms as possible, because old things with memories already associated with them encourage the formation of new memories, apparently. But Mum still ended up having too much stuff. She essentially

There’d been nothing in our house that we’d had just because my mum liked it; nothing that stood as a memento of her human life, her life in Malaysia. Everything was about convenience, not her taste or personality.

‘Er, so … I can’t actually see the forms,’ he says. He laughs and looks up. ‘But I’ve marked crosses where you need to sign.’ He brings his head low over the table and squints. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Here’s one.’ He slides a piece of paper and a pen across the table towards me, his thumb held firmly part way down the page where I need to sign. I can see t

I had also thought that she would like Olafur Eliasson’s piece, The Weather Project, for which there was a huge round mirror strung up to look like the setting sun in the same space, and dry ice to create a kind of false heat haze. But Mum said that she didn’t really miss the sun.

I realised that demon is a subjective term, and the splitting of my identity between devil and God, between impure and pure, was something that my mum did to me rather than the reality of my existence. Still, though, after a lifetime of eating just pigs’ blood, I feared eating anything else, especially human, in case I developed a taste for it, and

You think they won’t notice you not ageing? When they are thirty and you are still just how you look now? When they are forty, fifty? Any friendships are a lie from the start,’

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.