The Derelict (Revised)

(Ok, so this is something of a new direction for me to take my writing in. I would love feedback.)

“Earl! Where the hell is my oatmeal?” Rose said, her voice containing the essential components of both a shout and croak.
“It’s on its way, Missus Emerson,” Earl called from the tiny kitchen around the corner, concluding his thought with a cavernous burp.
“Don’t you burp like that, Earl. It’s rude,” she croak-shouted through tobacco-ravaged lungs. After a few moments of silence, she figured out that he had chosen not to grace her with a response, and in a few more he entered with a steaming bowl perched atop a breakfast tray clutched in oven-mitted hands. He set it down on the night table next to the antique lamp and glass of lukewarm water that seemed to always be half empty.
“Let’s get you sitting up, Missus Emerson,” Earl said in his cute, high southern drawl. In that voice, he almost made the feat of hauling Rose into the sitting position sound fun. She suspected he was one of those gays, and she was certainly no fan of the gays. About a month ago, though, she had decided that, even if he was gay, he was still a great help. She hadn’t thought those words exactly, however. Her precise thought had been closer to, At least one homo is good for something. This sentence repeated itself many times in Rose’s head as Earl exerted the entire force of his slim, dieted body to hauling the massive girth of her upper half from the horizontal to the vertical. His tan hands dug into her many layers of fat, only occasionally coming into contact with a flimsy, withered bone. After much complaining on her end about how he should be more careful, and quite a bit of grunting on his end, she was sitting up in her bed and Earl set the oatmeal on the tray in front of her.
“There’s no spoon,” she loudly observed.
“Oh darn, I’ll get it,” Earl said, and then, as an afterthought, he picked up the half-full glass of water and shook it indicatively. “Want a refill?”
Rose nodded. Or rather dipped her chin into the bulbous, lined thing that had long ago replaced her neck. Earl exited, glass in hand.
A thought that Rose never really vocalized, but often occurred to her in that grey strip that lay between the conscious and subconscious, was the other reason she liked Earl, or at least tolerated his eccentricities. He reminded her on some fundamental level of her first husband; the husband she now thought had been the only one she truly loved. Maybe it was just the romanticization of hindsight. She was, after all, only twenty-three when they were married, twenty-five when he left for Germany, and twenty-six when he died. Could she remember his face now? She really couldn’t, she concluded after a few moments of contemplation. She could remember that he had big ears that stuck out almost perpendicular to his head, but nothing else. Why had she loved him? Was he funny? Was he handsome? Was he sweet? She couldn’t remember. It was funny, she thought, that she couldn’t remember a darn thing about him other than that she had loved him. She honestly felt like that was one of the few things she could be sure of anymore.
Earl returned in a flurry of energy, practically prancing about her. The Earl that existed in reality was not as flamboyant as the Earl that existed inside Rose's head. Being bedridden for twelve years has a way of playing tricks on the mind, a fact which Rose had yet to consciously realize. As she peered at Earl through the slit between her swollen and pink eyelids, she tried to come up with word for what she was feeling. Anger? Contempt? Crankiness? Jealousy? Was that the right word? She couldn’t think of a better one than that, so she settled on it rather uncomfortably, but it made her mind drift in time. It skimmed over certain memories because they were more indistinct, fuzzy pictures trapped in her decaying psyche, or others because she didn’t really know where they came from until she settled on her fourth husband. Was it the word ‘jealousy’ that had reminded her of him? Yes, it was. She had been jealous of him. He had left her when she was almost seventy years old for a much younger woman. She had been jealous of him and his pretty, young girl for a long time. It was funny to her that he had been the last person she really lived with other than the various caretakers that had drifted in and out over the last… oh, how long had it been? Twenty, twenty-one years of caretakers? She liked to tell herself that they were getting younger. In fact, she said this so often that she very nearly believed it, but there was some part of her buried under layers upon layer fat, under a veil of a tired mind that told her quietly that she was aging, and aging fast. You don’t live forever, do you? No, no you do not. Do you even want to live forever in the first place? I don’t know dear, do you? It feels like I have already. Well how do you feel about that? Tired. Just tired.
“Missus Emerson, your oatmeal’s getting cold,” Earl said as he invaded her bubble of personal space and dragged her from her internal therapy session.
“I’m tired,” she whined.
“Pleeease. For me?” he said, waving a spoonful of the gelatinous oats inches from her nose. Simply because he was being so insistent, she decided to become contrarian.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” she lied.
“C’mon, Missus E.” He continued to wave the oatmeal in front of her eyes like an unfortunate pet owner trying to get its dog interested in an entirely uninteresting piece of dirty food.
“Don’t call me that,” Rose croaked. “And go away while you’re at it.”
“You sure—“
“Yes,” she snapped, exasperated.
Earl could tell it was a losing battle, snatched up the tray with the oatmeal, and left in a huff.
Earl’s flamboyancy had never bothered her more than it did at that moment, at least not in her memory. She hated all gays right then. She was tired of them treating her like a baby. She hated it, and she hated all of them. In reality, she knew few gays, and Earl was the first to treat her like a child right to her face. Despite this, Rose was comfortably ignorant and simply chose to dislike gays.
She sank into deep, bigoted thought for a while, occasionally distracted by the gay that she now hated so much and had helped her so much in the past. Thoughts drifted by, low-lying clouds on a windy day, most of them the indistinct musings of a decrepit individual. One cloud was unique, singular, if you will, in its originality for the mind of a deteriorating woman. It started as subconscious wisps of moisture, gained volume, and drifted into her conscious mind. When she recognized it, she almost flinched. It was new, novel. Her initial reaction was to reject it. She was a traditionalist, raised with traditional family values. Her eyes glazed over as her consciousness receded away from the material world and farther into the ethereal realm of thought.
“Earl, it’s time for my meds!” Rose heard herself shout. She realized for the first time in her life just how smoke-damaged her poor lungs were.
“Okay! On my way, dear!” Earl called back.
In moments, he was at her side bearing white bottles of pills, yet he seemed far away to her, as if she had receded farther into herself.
“I think I need another glass of water,” she said.
“Don’t you already have—?“
“Would you please?” she asked, her voice dripping with artificial sweetener.
Overcome by how polite she was, Earl turned to fetch another glass.
He left the pills.
Rose’s singular thought had been an epiphany of sorts. It had told her that Earl was treating her how she should be treated. She had regressed over the past half century from the healthy, middle-aged woman to the oversized infant. The parentless infant. The infant who would never grow up. She had lived for over a century, and she had spent almost a third of that century as a derelict, a nearly mindless, nearly immobile thing.
Rose picked up one of her bottles of pills and opened it with dexterity that surprised even herself.
She didn’t like who she had become.
Rose picked up her first glass of water.
She didn’t like what she had become.
Rose hesitated for a moment.