This is actually a very old piece, originally written a decade ago and then revamped about five years later. Something about it keeps drawing me back. Perhaps I ought to call it a prose poem rather than a story, though…
Cover by Aero Gallerie.
The patient Talla wakes in the hospital of the all-but-dead, and the lights burn her eyes in steady beams. Prismatic spectra roll over her cheeks, up the white walls and across the ceiling, spinning around in a mathematical dance. The curtain about her bed ruffles upward in the draft of an open window. She breathes in through crystal-powered lungs.
“Is there a chance she’d still breathe?” says a voice on the left, and it’s him. Pallas her husband, doctor for the living, here in the hospital of the all-but-dead. He stands over her bed in the light, wearing a bug-eyed mask and a crisp white overcoat. Silver hair sticks up behind the mask, but his back doesn’t stoop. His voice hasn’t aged. He raises his hand, and there dangles from his fist the crystal, spinning slowly on a thread.
“Will she feel it? I mean will she know?”
Talla is all but dead and stares transfixed. The spectra spin, and her lungs pull in and out.
“No,” Pallas says, across the silent line to unseen others in the mask. “It makes no difference.”
He shifts left as if to get a better look at her. As if listening, considering. To Talla the line remains silent, and she begins to hear the rhythms in the dance of the spectra: quiet whirring, like slow, distant fans. Then Pallas lets go of the thread.
Talla’s chest heaves upward. The crystal hovers in midair above her, still turning, winking in the light.
“A second ago,” Pallas says. And then, “I know.”
Talla’s eyes roll and her lips twitch. Her chest pulls in, pushes out. The spectra spin, and she’s breathing still. Pallas walks around the foot of the bed, watching her.
“She’s strong yet,” he observes to the others.
Then the crystal slows, and Talla chokes. Her eyes close, her chin tilts, and she gasps, chokes again, tries to lift her arms.
“Over ten seconds now.”
The whirring rhythms slur and tumble off-balance like a top at the end of a spin.
“Could be,” Pallas says, and his voice is quieter. The age begins to show. “But would she remember?”
Talla’s body strains for life and strives for motion. Her throat ticks and tocks as the crystal winds down and the spectra go to entropy in the hospital of the all-but-dead.
Pallas shudders and lifts the thread again. Air floods into Talla’s lungs, and the spectra dance again, precise, mathematical.
“I’m not sure,” he says with a laugh, as her throat wheezes. “Just a feeling. I’ll get over it soon.”
But he holds the crystal and touches two fingers to her shoulder. They both see the colors.
#
Hotel sofa, last night of the honeymoon. Cabernet chilled, aerated and poured to the lip. At the nip of his teeth, her hand swayed. The glass tipped. Red splashed over her slip and sent him back gasping, and she was there laughing, don’t you vant to suck my blood?
Don’t be a child, he said, scrambling for a towel. Blood isn’t funny. Death isn’t funny.
And his hands trembled as he wiped away the blood and she was silent.
#
Cheap motel, weekend getaway. Screaming tangerine covers and she was dressed in them. She was through calling him with her voice, and now her body was trying, pushing through a call. He picked up the phone when it buzzed, moved to the bathroom with the fan running, and shut the door. When his body came out trembling he laid it in bed and turned its back to her. After a time she clicked out the lights. Her body didn’t dare tell him she was there.
#
Spring at the second home and rows of daffodils waving along the walls. Talla crouched in her workclothes, and her knees soaked up the earth. Her fingers stroked the daffodil faces, yellow as bile. Pallas arrived smelling of antiseptic and stepped forward to touch her hair. She picked up her trowel.
#
Pastel green walls of the delivery room. Blood glistened on his trembling hands, and he faced away. The first and last of their losses lay in her arms.
#
Club pool, swimming with her nieces. Electric blue shocked her skin as it rippled around the lines of her. Pallas sat idling and watching from the edge of a tablet. When the nieces pleaded for ice cream, Talla rose and beckoned. The nieces dangled from her arms. He handed her a note of cash and she stood there dripping, her hair heavy on her shoulders.
#
Home by the window-wall, six months before. They spoke of retirement over a table of poker, and her eyes glittered over a hand of cards colored indigo. He laid his first: a row of faces, a royal flush. She threw down her cards, and they skittered away as he laughed and collected his chips.
Curse you and your luck, Talla said, but it’s your first sign of life and I’ll take it.
#
And then the vessel burst. Her world went blood-black, and for months to come his world turned white as a coat, geometric as a prism.
#
Talla breathes now in the hospital of the all-but-dead, and the lights burn her eyes in steady beams. The spectra spin. The curtain and the patient lie still.
“It’s too late,” Pallas says, and he lifts his fingers from her shoulder.
Her breaths come shallow and choke in her throat. Pallas looks away.
“You won’t remember.” The unseen others are gone, and he is speaking to her. His voice is precise and mathematical. “Think of me. I don’t want to remember.”
She strains for the use of her voice. In her mind she stretches her neck and shakes her head. Her lips move without a sound.
“The truth is,” he says, “we’re both already dead.”
He turns and lets go of the thread.
