Waiting Room

Mother walked through the door to the other side, into the gaping mouth of the oncology wing. It sang persistent high pitched sterile notes. I waited for a long time in a tastefully boring room with padded hardback chairs, outdated magazines, and the television set on mute. Get comfortable, the room seemed to say. But not too comfortable.

I already knew Brad and Angie’s wedding plans. QVC featured yet another garish piece of jewelry. The Butterfly Eternity Pin. Now you can grace your knitting circle in style, decked out in geriatric bling. Speaking of geriatrics, I was surrounded by exactly the kind of old people who bought expensive QVC jewelry. A woman, perhaps in her seventies- slim, spritely, and oh so talkative- flashed her gleaming teeth around the room. I understood of course. People like her, people who wore slacks and cardigans even in the summer, did not worry about whether or not they can afford expensive anesthesia. They do not have to decide between two sick family members. Which one can we afford? Which disease is a bigger emergency?

There were more of them. All matching the beige room. So very taupe. I wondered if the kind of success these people possessed in their old age had numbed them to universally human understanding of suffering. They scattered about the room. Some nodded grimly to one another. Others congregated and gossiped in knowing whispers. A wave of morbid camaraderie permeated the area and suddenly it wasn’t quiet or somber at all. A fat orderly wheeled some shriveled man out into the room. He clutched a plastic cup full of apple juice, probably, and raised it to the room. L’chaim! To life!

I waited for a long time.

The Biographer

She’s hungry. Her hands shake, but the movement of her body is graceful, fluid, studied. Her breath is ragged; yet her eyes close, and she completes the dance. Vacant sounds accompany the opiate ballerina- faraway waves crashing against the rocky beach, the electric denouement of bars freckling the streets, a revving of a motorcycle in C major.

First the allegro. The hunger clawing at her skin begs to be satiated. The desperation. Elevé, glissade, jètè, kick-ball-change. She unbuttons her jeans and leans against the wall spread eagle. Her underwear, so pretty. So pink. A curl of strawberry blond peaks out, softly billowing in the night breeze. The inside of her thigh is bruised, the flesh a palate of twilight colors. Dark reds, purples, blues, faded violets.  She is a work of accidental art, sprayed watercolor on a canvas, a masterful sketch. A superior first draft of a tragic poem lost in the scrap pile, written absentmindedly on an envelope or between the lines of a grocery list. One loved only by scholars and fanatics.

She is hungry. She slaps her thigh and holds the tool of her salvation steady, steady, steady…then the piqué and the immediate reward. The tautness of her dancing shoulders is released with a thrum of violin strings. The movement of her anesthetized limbs is almost sensual. Arousing. Her head rolls back and the syringe out of her hand.

While she still quivers with pleasure, I move. Out of the shadows. If she sees me, she doesn’t show it. If she sees me, she must not care. I love her. So I come closer until I loom over her and straddle her bedraggled body. I want to touch her everywhere, but I can’t. I have to move quickly. It is my turn to dance.

I study her face. There’s a trace of alarm in her eyes though her face is still slack. Her lips move, but I can’t make out a sound. Only a faint, warm breath on my cheek. Her eyes are dark, cavernous. She swallows, and the smooth skin on her throat strains against the words she can’t say. I run my finger down her neck. It’s so beautiful. It’s so warm and graceful. I kiss her there, right in the hollow under her jaw. I smell smoke, sweat, and sex on her. There. Right in the hollow of her throat. It’s so full of stories.

I reach into the pocket of my coat and grasp a coil of industrial wire. There it is, pulled taut between us, like all of the things we wish we could say to each other. The middle C of a violincello. A deep vibrato hum in the air. I press it against her throat.

Her eyes try to tell me something. She struggles against the weight of my body as I sit on her chest, my knees pinning down her arms like the translucent wings of a moth fluttering helpless underneath the studied gaze of a dedicated collector.

Her eyes tell me everything.

She’s hungry.

Shhhh, I whisper. I don’t dare disturb our microcosm. There is love in holding on. There is beauty in letting go. Power in taking. Today we triumph. Today we are all three.

She lingers. She strains against the truth. Her lips are the blue of a velvet sky right after the sunset. The last breath of the earth. A tear trails down her face. Her eyelashes darken with moisture. The whites of her eyes are veined with delicate lines. A capillary bursts, and a fleck of red spreads until it traces the black of her iris. She is parchment. She is pen. She writes herself into the story like a blot of ink.

We are at the cusp. We stand at the edge of the world. We breathe in unison. Her last breath will be ours. She emits a choking sound. Her eyelashes quiver and eyes roll back into her head. I let go of the wire. I touch her face, trace my finger around her lips. I lean in. I can smell her breath. It is sour and heavy. My lips touch hers. I kiss her and breathe her in. She moves no more.

She was hungry.

But not as hungry as I.

Oh Mother, Where Art Thou?

I can still make it to class if I want to, but I don’t. Instead, I rev up my car, waking it from its slumped sleep. I drive for a long time even though I know I can’t afford the gas. I stop at a decrepit gas station and buy a pack of cigarettes. I feel silly, standing there deciding what kind I want. Squinting my eyes, trying to discern which ones are the cheapest, I finally just go for the prettiest box, the one with the camels and palm trees on it. The cashier, a squat angry-looking woman, cards me, tapping her red claws against the sticky countertop as I fish out my driver’s license.

The drive takes hours, ribboned with desiccated cornfields and old houses. My gauge has been on empty for a while now and I finally roll into a parking lot of Sisters of Compassion Home for the Elderly, tucked away into the nowhere.

I press against the heavy door, freshly painted white by someone careless and in a hurry. A dimly lit, carpeted hallway stretches into indiscernible darkness. Like a vein in the forearm, the hallway is thick with air I can sop up with a tissue. Rasping, clawing coughs rupture the warbled silence. Someone hacks and spits.

No one mans the front desk, so I sign my name in the guestbook as Chuck Norris. Purpose for the visit: Kicking Ass. I hope the receptionist is humorless and is offended by my signature, but I have a feeling no one checks the guestbook. Ronald McDonald visited Grimace a few months ago. And weeks before that, Pearl Hudson came by to pick up a box of her mother’s belongings.

I let my uncertainty trail behind me like a child’s blanket against the dirty carpet as I walk into the belly of the hallway. I can’t spot a single nurse or staff member, not even a janitor. Animal smells pursue me. Unwashed bodies. Age and disease cling to my sweater and hair.

A giggle erupts from a room. It is manic and desperate and pleading. It scares me, but I pause.

Room 107.

The curtains are drawn. A sister of compassion sits in the corner, her profile flaring in the light of the t.v. She sees me, brushes off her habit, and leaves the room. I am alone with a body swallowed by the bed it rests on.

Is this really her? To say this…thing…is engendered seems perverse. It is a non-being. A corpse.

When were these hands pulling at my hair, braiding it so tight I never thought I’d blink again? Was it ten, fifteen, twenty years ago that I sat in her kitchen? Pressed my nose against the softness of her shoulder, inhaling the lingering scent of soap and something fried.

I don’t think I can unhinge my jaw. I want to say, Hello. I miss you. But there is always something else. Someone else. Young and handsome. Tight butt. The way she always liked ‘em, she said. And there is a hand gripping my mouth, pressing my mouth shut. I am seven and he’s twenty seven and I think he broke a tooth. I want her to claw at his back like a madwoman. To tear him off of me and into shreds. I want her to scream and yell and curse and shatter and move and kiss and hug and love and sing and dance and laugh and cry. But she can only hide her bruises. She can only lie in bed.

I wore my favorite shirt. It was light pink with bright red strawberries, fat and soft felt on my tummy. And I remember him knocking the honey off the table and pushing my face into my cereal. Then the floor, and it was grimy and slick. I could see her shoes under the table, patent and shiny. Tapping nervously. The clatter of her fork scraping at the bottom of her plate. The clock.

I want a five more minutes, but I get eternity. I want another story.

Some machine behind her bed falters for a moment before resuming its steady reminder.  Hey. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m still breathing.

I remember my ninth birthday. I spent it in the hospital, blew out a candle that melted green onto a syrupy pancake brought in by a jolly nurse. And when they visited they brought a red balloon and donuts. She didn’t speak to me then. Only he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. And when I wet the sheets, she slapped me and tore the blanket and hospital gown off of me, leaving me cold, wet and humiliated.

I walk over to her and she rasps into my face. I see the breathing tubes stuck up her nose, pumping oxygen into her deflated self. I pinch the clear airways and the machine protests, buzzing. I want her to open her eyes and look at me.

I’m not broken. I’m still standing, see?

But she doesn’t move. And doesn’t kiss or hug or laugh. She only watches from behind a coffee mug. I can see her big, brown eyes. Blink. Blink. Is there a twitch when she hears the crack of broken bone? It’s indiscernible. She is all knowing but not all powerful.

It hurts me only a little, but I get the syringe from my purse. It’s empty and deadly. I’m sure she’s awake now and her beady eyes are hateful. I pull her arm. It is old and wrinkled and soft. I’m afraid to move her because she smells of rot. But I find her vein through the translucent skin. The needle pierces flesh so easily, as if it’s always belonged there. And just like that, there is emptiness travelling through her and it will stop her heart in one minute. I take my scissors and lean over her. I look into her eyes. They’re a sad and infinite blue. I run my hand through her white hair, matted and coarse, before pressing the tip of the scissors against her scalp. They make a tight, pleasing sound when I snip off a long lock.

I look around before leaving. I have twenty seconds. She has twenty seconds. At last. We share something. Photographs hang all around her room. Of children and pets. And I wonder if they’ve ever had broken arms, those children.

At home pin the hair to my wall, picking its appropriate shade in the gradient of silvers and whites. I elicit a mildly interested look from my roommate. She’s never asked me about my masterpiece, but she tells all of her friends that I am an art student, which is a lie, and that I keep to myself, which is a truth. When she leaves, I open the window and blow the cigarette smoke out into the cool air. I worry now of small things.

Violetta Nikitina, 2013