prompt: perfect, title: reading lessons for mice in misc. flash fiction

He’s afraid he needs to be perfect. He doesn’t need that. It’s easy as putting a disc in the slot and hitting a button on the remote control. I know that even if he made a mistake, it’d do no damage, reversible by pressing some other button but again he doesn’t know that and I’m afraid I’ll never be able to fully explain it to him. He’s so anxious and frustrated and I just want him to be able to watch his damned movies in peace. But to get it through his head with his disability, to make the concepts stick, I basically need to be perfect myself. We are in none-too-dissimilar binds, really.

Schizophrenia slowly felled my uncle Donny’s mind over the course of his late teens and early twenties, as that damn thing has shattered so many young women and men throughout history. Brushing up against the horror of American psychiatry in the late Seventies and early Eighties, my grandmother decided the most humane solution was to make the 3rd floor of her home his hermitage, leaving mostly just for solitary hikes and bikes. My Gramma, the sole intermediary between Donny and harsh reality for decades, her son’s custodian and advocate. It didn’t work perfectly, but nothing does, and I have no doubt it was the best solution of countless bad ones.

But the year is 2024 now, and beyond the faded-yet-not-absent voices in his head from a genetic curse, he also hasn’t meaningfully interacted with modern society or culture in forty years, more or less. And as his baby nephew, now in early middle age myself, I am trying to explain his new DVD player to him. Over and over. For hours on end. This button plays, this button stops. Shiny side toward you. He is so set in his ways, by madness and solitude in equal measure, it mystifies him to have a machine even slightly different than the last. He thinks it must be worth thousands of bucks. He thinks it might explode, I suppose. I can’t fully explain to him that there aren’t even that many new DVD players to choose from anymore, that most people just stream the stuff now. The rubber bands in his mind snapped when you could still buy films on Betamax, hallucinations set aside. I just want to help my uncle watch his copy of “Silent Running” with Bruce Dern but I may as well be a time-traveler blowing cave-minds by rolling up on a cart with big stone wheels.

My phone buzzes. My mom texts me, “you can’t teach a mouse to read no matter how much you try”, that it’s wonderful I made the effort, but don’t beat myself up about it. Donny asks “What’s that?” God, I realize, he has no concept of what a cell-phone is, let alone what one does. I might be able to explain it to him but I need to be perfect from now on. I gotta be perfect starting now.