My Dementia in Cease, Cows

When I was 15, I was having a bit of a problem with drugs. I overdosed and almost died. My mother attempted rehab by sending me to a home nursing course. I got a job at a nursing home, where the still-well people lived in nice apartments with kitchens and water views, and the dying people lived in the basement.

I worked mostly in the basement. It was sad. I wrote my first short story and forced my parents and five younger siblings to sit on the beach on a drift log and listen to me read the story.

“Send it out,” my mother said.

A magazine wrote back, “We’re up to our ears in dying old people.”

Now everyone’s up to their ears in demented old people. But this is Leah’s story, and Leah wasn’t old. And I’m telling it. So listen.

When we turned thirty, not quite in our prime, but close, we were still attractive.

See the rest of the story My Dementia by K.C. Pedersen in Cease, Cows.

About Cease, Cows: At Cease, Cows we want to explore the contemporary, the strange, the big questions. We want to feel cultural pulses, expose mental arteries, bathe in both the sanguine and sanguinary. We want to publish prose with fire and truth. Humans may be animals, but the power of words can allow us to revel in or transcend the physical. The best literature achieves both. Or something profound like that.