Jane
by Alexander Littlefield
Jane Alleyne learned she was narcoleptic when she tumbled out of her chair during a night shift at the hospital where she nursed. She kept her condition secret until years later. The giveaway: burns on her hands, sustained while working over a donut fryer. Having been raised in the colonial playground of Barbados by a father who tended orchids alongside his patients, Joan must have experienced these blue-collar burns and bruises with a special sort of pain.
Her affliction seemed to worsen as Jane aged. Perhaps because of her narcoleptic inability to sustain anything more 
than mild and ephemeral emotion, she was an icy matriarch, as prim as her muted British accent, and as tightly wound as the steel-gray bun she pinned back, each and every morning, behind her beautifully proportioned head. (Iciness aside, no one disputed the fact that Jane was achingly beautiful)
When finally unable to care for herself, she moved in with her daughter’s family, bringing along Winston II, her faithful Lhasa Apso. Days Jane kept to herself, but by night she terrorized the dinner table. Silent and severe, she never seemed to enjoy the meals, and could drop into a narcoleptic trance at the slightest offense—a grandchild’s speaking too softly; an elbow on the table; talking out of turn. Knowing that anger sent her swooning, Jane stifled it, letting it swell inside her until—eyelids drooping, head lolling on her neck, tongue fastened to one corner of her mouth in a last-ditch scramble for control—she was overwhelmed.
Some nights, through the walls, her grandchildren could hear her moaning, terrified, in her sleep.
Jane died in 2002, of heart disease brought on by her medication. Her fifth granddaughter cared for her in her final days, cleaning her after visits to the bathroom and putting in her dentures—before being forced to leave them out altogether, which only exaggerated Jane’s decrepitude and (humiliating, enraging her) gave her further reason for fits. Towards the end, Jane couldn’t even set her bun in place. Confined to her bed, wracked by nightmares and her own inexpressible rancor, she seemed to live out her final days in a single seething narcoleptic swoon. By the time she passed away, even Winston II was too terrified to go near her.
