The Cable of Life

Margaret Sullivan pressed the button on her remote control, the same remote she'd had for seventeen years, its letters worn smooth from her thumb. The television flickered to life—the cable news, same anchors, different faces. Some mornings, at seventy-eight, she felt like one of those creatures her grandson called 'zombies'—moving through familiar routines, coffee to chair to television to pills.

She reached for her vitamin organizer, the plastic boxes labeled with days of the week. Her daughter Sarah had bought it last Christmas, worried about her mother forgetting. Margaret smiled. Sarah meant well, just as Margaret had meant well when she bought her own mother that walker with the tennis balls on the feet. The circle of caring, stretching forward and backward like a cable through time.

'Dad says you're still watching cable news?' grandson Tyler had teased during yesterday's visit. 'Nana, nobody watches cable anymore. Everything's streaming.' He'd shaken his head at her old-fashioned ways, the way she'd once shaken her head at her father's transistor radio.

The vitamins rattled as she tipped them into her palm. Vitamin D for her bones, B12 for energy, calcium because the doctor insisted. A handful of hope in pill form. She swallowed them with her coffee, bitter and familiar.

On the television, a weatherman pointed at maps. Hurricane coming. Margaret remembered hurricanes—staying up all night with candles, the house groaning, Arthur's arm around her shoulders, the children sleeping on mattresses in the hallway. They'd lost the electricity for three days. No cable, no television. Just each other.

She fingered the cable-knit afghan on her chair back, something Arthur's mother had made. Yellow and cream squares, worn thin in places. How many hands had touched this? How many generations wrapped in its warmth?

'Zombie apocalypse!' Tyler had laughed while playing his video games. Margaret didn't understand, but she understood the sound of young laughter in her house, rare and precious.

The sun pressed through her window, warm on her face. Another day. The cable television droned on. Her vitamins settled in her stomach. She wasn't a zombie, just continuing. Just being. And wasn't that its own kind of miracle? The cable connecting past to present, the vitamins sustaining the body, the zombie mornings that weren't really zombie mornings at all—just the slow, sweet business of still being here.