Listen by Kate E. Lore

Rosie is an elderly retired woman. She’d been a cosmetics girl behind the counter at Macy’s. That is until she got married. In her day getting married was your career. Rosie had five children and it wasn’t easy.

Rosie’s husband has been dead for many years now. Unfortunate truth be told he went rather early. Rosie relied upon family support up until now, where it’s more like the government. Rosie is the last of her generation, the last of her friends. And her kids never visit. 

Rosie is old, Rosie is bored, and Rosie is alone. She listens to the neighbors for company. There is a young couple next-door-right-side, drunks or drug addicts they’re always good drama. To the left lives a quiet lonely homosexual man. He has flings, the rare romance, but never a friendly visit. Never family. He has a parrot that can talk and it’s incredibly well trained. The bird can sing, make jokes, and apparently perform stunts. They do live performances and are gone for most of the summer. Rosie likes to hear them working on the routine and trying out new tricks.

Rosie’s favorite is Mr. Cook. That’s the man upstairs. He’s an old man. She can hear him shuffle about. She can hear him making coffee in the kitchen. 

“Good Morning Mr. Cook.” Rosie would say.

Mr. Cook gets up every morning at 7 am sharp. He meets his buddies for coffee at the local donut shop. He meets them every single day. Rosie likes the way he dresses. He has style. He wears a fedora hat, a well fitting jacket, and nice shoes. And Mr. Cook is black which reminds Rosie of Michael the boy she’d dated in high school a secret kept from her parents. There was something so exhilarating about that time in high school. Rosie smiles at the memory. She’d been so young and carefree then. They both were. The world seemed so fresh and new back then. Like anything could happen. 

“Lunch time,” Rosie says when Mr. Cook comes home from having coffee at the donut shop. Mr. Cook is the sort of person who drinks coffee continuously throughout the day. He has a pot on standby at all times. Rosie knows because she listens closely.

Rosie has toyed with the idea of approaching Mr. Cook. She’s thought about proposing that they both stop spending the remainder of their lives alone and spend the ends of their days together. And she’s even imagined what it might be like, but just for a moment. Because she remembered that her husband's little brother Bill was still alive and he really wouldn’t understand. He’d be upset. He’d feel dishonored.

“Diner time prayer,” Rosie says out loud as she hears Mr. Cook sit down in his beloved recliner. She can just barely hear his voice over the sound of the TV. Rosie stands on tippy toes on top of her coffee table in order to hear him. They recite it together;

“Dear lord and heavenly father, thank you for this food. Thank you for the opportunity of life. Thank you for my home and my children. Please help Sheila’s cancer… Please ease her pain.” The last part of the prayer often changes. But this prayer had been the same for three weeks running. “Thank you, Jesus, Amen.”

Rosie climbs down from her coffee table. Her feet thump onto the wooden flooring and she winces in fear he might have heard. Rosie waits but there is no response. Then Rosie hears the clinking of his silverware against the plate, and she exhales.

Rosie takes a seat in her own recliner. She has positioned it to where she thinks Mr. Cook’s to be set. She’s even tried to put her TV the same distance away and at the same volume. Rosie suspects that Mr. Cook may have bad hearing. She suspects he’s been simply reading the captions all along. Rosie knows what channels Mr. Cook watches. She likes to watch shows with him. 

“Mr. Cook?” Rosie asks when she hears a strange sound from above. It sounded like coughing or gasping. Thump. Rosie sees the ceiling shake. She grabs her phone and dials 911. She listens for an answer. She listens for help. She listens to Mr. Cook struggling to breathe. She listens to hear him alive. She listens for the ambulance as she wonders why it’s taking so long. She listens to Mr. Cook knock his hand on the floor three times. She listens to him slump on the floor, collapsing. She listens for sirens. She listens.

Artist’s Statement

I write a lot about characters who are lonely, and this piece is no exception. What really interests me though, is how we can be so isolated but still hold ourselves back from making a real human connection. Is it social stigma? Is it some imagined loyalty? Is it fear or rejection and hurt? I'm concerned with how afraid some of us are to take a risk, to move our feet forward. So in this piece, I sort of set up this scenario and ask, at the very end, a question.

Kate E Lore is the pen name of Kate Isaacs. Currently earning a master's degree in creative writing from Miami University, Kate graduated with a bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University. Born in Dayton Ohio, Kate has self-published comics, been featured in anthologies, written articles for magazines, and has had multiple publications in literary magazines for both fiction and nonfiction. 

A jack-of-all-trades Kate splits her time up between fiction and nonfiction, a graphic memoir, a written one, screenplays, flash prose, full-length novels, painting, and comics. Not to mention her blog.

Kate is openly queer and neurodivergent. She grew up the youngest of four raised by a single mother living below the poverty level. She is the second of those four children to graduate high school. She is the first person in her immediate family to earn a Bachelor's degree, and she will soon be the first, of even the extended family, to earn a Masters. 

For more information, see: Kateelore.com, https://www.facebook.com/writerlore, https://twitter.com/KateeLore