There has been a person’s temple bashed, like a dog chewing its bone, that rolling of edges. Then bullets, one entering at a shoulder, one getting inside a gut, this last at first like a paper snapped taught, then a water cooler’s large air pocket shifting position from spout to canister’s head. That gooey burble.
She stopped speaking abruptly, took several more sips of tea, gazed out the window.
I don’t know why they’ve done this to me, she moaned quietly, and in the next second composed herself to say: My coloring remains healthy and look – here she held a hand out over the table, over cookies wound around a tray’s edge and into the center like a finely patterned snake – I hold a steady hand. This one, too.
My sister showed me next her other hand. She held each out for what felt like several minutes while we both waited silently.
I know, she began again, that I’m breaking down. I can hear it inside me, can feel it. Whole sections of my arms, yesterday a portion from my left chest. This morning, not a minute after waking, the front half of my esophagus. What parts still hold fast inside are struck by those which drop. Often my lungs tickle and it becomes difficult to swallow. A bone will begin to float, nothing to clamp it in place. It will raze the underside of my skin and I’ll feel it not just there but in a corresponding spot on my body. My armpit, for instance, or the back of my hip, in the dimple.
I am afraid, she sighed, that when everything beneath my façade has disappeared – all my bones and organs, my entire nervous system, my fatty gray lump of brain – I am afraid that I will continue. That the aliens have made it so I will not, cannot, destruct. With all that open space inside me the sounds will only vibrate louder. How will my eyes not burst? How can I not expect blood from my ears, dark red tears? Inevitably my pores must fail and I pray that then the rest of me will too.
Already it’s becoming dark outside, the day eaten by drizzle and low clouds.
I should go soon, I say. You’re good to have me, but I have to get back. The cats are at home, alone. Not a single light on in the house.
My sister, looking out the window, nods. She replies she’d almost hoped I’d stay for dinner, to visit with her husband when he arrived home. Not today, I think, rocking slightly in my seat. I think: Enough for one day.
All of this has been a surprise, a string of them: seeing her, her story, the call she placed to me the day before.
Hello? she'd whispered, both our mornings still black.
Immediately caves in me dampened. I was a child again, Chinese food wolfed, departure awaited in a vinyl red booth. There my sister grasped my hand, my cradled cookie, and crushed its sweet body between us. The whole time she smiled. Our downy legs kept sliding for the floor. Our knees became embossed with crumbs. Together we gasped. Don’t let go, she told me, and I didn’t. Just that once, I gripped like I’d break my way inside her.
Is that you? she’d whispered, years and years later, and I’d said, Of course it is, who else would it be. I meant to snap but my lungs wouldn’t help me. What air gush I craved came instead as threads. When had this rot begun? Termites of love and longing had snuck inside and eaten my aloofness to shreds. My structure swayed, unsafe.
I need to see you, she told me softly. You’re the only one.
I’m right here, I’d said. I’m on my way.
Now, husky with spit, I say how the weather is supposed to worsen. I say my eyesight fails in the dark. I need to make it home this evening, I say, I just do.
My talk is babble. Again my sister nods.
Up she presses herself, hands on knees, weight borne in heels. She says: I hope you got a good look at the magnolia while you were here. It hasn’t flowered this fine since the second year we had it.
I glance out the window as I stand to leave. The tree’s trunk has grown to the width of a hearty woman’s thigh, the bush of it climbing past first floor windows, hovering beneath second. Its branches bend and stretch, invisible in their inching. The flowers tremble beneath the veiling mist. I think of biting into a petal, its thickness, the wax left on my teeth. The sound it could make breaking in my mouth, like snow cold enough to splinter.
A moment later my sister is holding out my coat, my scarf, standing at the door to turn the knob and let me out. She peers past my head, down the hall to the room we’ve left. Her eyes widen briefly, amber color pulsing. She shudders and fidgets, shuffles her feet.
Well, I say.
She tilts: Well.
Out in the damp dusk I fiddle at my car. Teeth scrape the paint deeply as I try to fit the key inside its lock. Cursing, I get finally into the driver’s seat. I start the motor up, make the wipers move across the windshield to clear the water collected. All I can think is how much that scratch will cost me of the car’s worth. I obsess over this fact, my brain relieved by something so banal.
My sister has closed her door but still stands in the long glass beside it, peering out. At the street corner, when I look in my rearview, her silhouette has yet to move.
A month passes.
I haven’t worked in several years, but still I wake as though I do. When I practiced medicine, I was up at four and five in the morning, preparing coffee, frying eggs and toasting bread.
Any longing for sweets died in my youth. My toast holds butter now and nothing more.
Years ago, a particular case had me in the emergency room during a winter’s blizzard, two-thirty in the morning. The patient was old and food poisoned, unable to hold fluids and expelling from both ends. Dehydration was imminent. The ambulance retrieved him, drove the sloppy, dead streets with lights spinning but no siren wail. He was delivered through the bay’s sliding glass doors on a stretcher blanketed in snow, enough so that we brushed it to the floor in great wet handfuls. The custodian came along to mop.
He was the last patient to arrive during the remainder of a dim morning stretch. We had no family of his to contact. He’d called himself in, then lay waiting behind his unlocked front door, wrapped in old blankets that the paramedics kindly took to be laundered.
