Toni Le Busque's stories.

It’s 3am-ish and I’m sitting on an uncomfortable wooden kitchen chair next to my mother’s bed, holding her hand.
She’s not looking at me.
She’s looking up at the ceiling and sliding her thumb intermittently back and forward  along the edge of my hand.

'I want to see the kids,' she says, 'they're coming tomorrow,'
'Who,' I say, while thinking how soft her hands are, 'the grandkids?'
She tells me yes.
'Yeh,' I say, 'and Travis and Jack are coming next week.'
There’s a pause then, from her.
'That'll be too late,' she says
And I say, ’Do you think you’ve only got a couple of days left?’ and she tells me yes. 

Then I say-‘Your chest sounds gurgly. That’ll be all those fucking Marlboro Reds,’ and she rolls her eyes, just like my grandmother used to do, and tells me the morphine’s beginning to work and she’s going back to sleep. 

I’ve used these eyes in drawings before, having nicked them from a Phantom comic.
I think of them as the eyes of fear. 
I know that If I was lying in bed dying of cancer, I’d have these eyes on.

I’d be well and truly shitting myself in terror.