Somehow the curtains blew into the room whilst the branches cracking away from the trees into the blue sky outside didn’t sway in the slightest. The plug radio hummed to itself in its singular dulcet tone in the kitchen corner – spilling out indecipherable syllables and a faint reminder of what music once was. Each small room, three in total, smelt of something new gone old: scuffed Formica in the kitchen, well-filled upholstery in the living room and a grazed, heavy bath tub in the bathroom. The toilet was smart, orderly like you’d find in an efficient factory.

Anyway, she chose the kitchen – the ancient round radio had soothed her for over fifty years – that was not about to change. Funny how it still sounded the same as it always had. Surely many of the presenters had died, but they still sounded the same. Were it not for the news being different she could well believe it had been on some kind of electronic loop since the 60s. So, with its speaker bubbling in the corner she spent her days cooking as slow as necessary – cutting onions for thirty minutes, peeling potatoes careful as the last hammer taps on a sculpture, scrubbing pans which only got old through being cleaned, never a single trace of food on them.

And, all this seemed to be it. A simple apartment – just like the rest of them. That thought fled until the next time when she heard the dull thumps on the doubled-door.

It could have been anyone, but not him. Even though she thought about him fully and daily, she never allowed herself to really believe the infrequent callers could be him. As soon as she opened the door a peek it got shoved at her. In the time it took him to blurt out ‘mum’ he’d vanished into the toilet.
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Crank up the speed and volume of a carcass rotting by one hundred and you have the sound of man shitting one of his last. It’s like the body has developed vocal chords from about six or seven other holes and is belting out wails for the first time – all them spanked by a malicious doctor to wake them up.

Alternatively, imagine the sound of a man being turned inside-out.
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That’s what Pyotr’s mother heard as she waited on the other side of the door. Her emotions so physical on her. She kept telling herself to think about what to ask him, not to be hard on him, but she kept thinking about the heavy blood in her family. So heavy she could feel it swimming in her feet.
‘Why does he weigh me down like this? Why is this kind of love so, so heavy?’

You can find Living and dying in Pete's - part 3 here.