The Woman

When she was a young girl, her favourite pass-time was dressing up. She would wait until her mother was busy in the garden, and her brother was out, and sneak in to her brother's room. There, she would rummage in his chest of drawers for old sweaters and trousers, or at the bottom of his wardrobe for his mud-stained football kit, or sometimes carefully pull out his dark, stiff suit on it's hanger. Shaking quietly with anticipation, and more than a little fear of getting caught, she would remove and fold her dress and shining patent buckle-up shoes, and then put on the stolen outfit. Her brother was bigger than her, so she would carefully turn up the bottom of the trousers and cuffs. Once she was even brave enough to replace her pink cotton pants with his grey baggy ones with the unfamiliar y-shaped design on the front. Once dressed, she would edge open the door of the room, listening carefully for any sounds from downstairs, and creep across the hallway to her mother's room. There, she would open the box on the dresser from which her mother would sometimes fetch rouge for her daughter's cheeks for a party, and find the dark kohl pencil inside. She applied this carefully to her top lip, smudging and sketching until she had a passable moustache. Once completed, she would open her mother's wardrobe to look at herself in the full-length mirror. She would examine herself from all angles, puffing out her chest, and swagger back and forth in front of the mirror. Sometimes she would pretend to smoke a cigar, as her uncle did, or flex her muscles like a cartoon sailor.
The nurse that laid her out after her death at the retirement home knew none of this. She had never told anyone about her secret, even her husband of fifty years. The nurse was simply a little puzzled when she saw, underneath the floral print nightgown with the lace collar, the woman was wearing a pair of old-fashioned y-front pants and a crepe bandage wrapped around her age-shrunken breasts.