Endings

by J. Alan Nelson

The hospice room smells like antiseptic
and the ghost of cigarettes she swore she quit in ’89.
Everyone pretends this is normal,
the way we pretend the body isn’t a house
slowly evicting itself,
one lamp at a time.

She lies there, small now,
a woman who once weaponized silence
and could make a Thanksgiving prayer feel like a tax audit.
We take shifts anyway,
because blood is stubborn
and guilt has a longer half-life than morphine.

Her mouth moves like she’s tasting something sour
nobody else can see.
The nurse adjusts the drip,
calls her “sweetie,”
the way people call stray cats “buddy”
right before they close the trap.

I watch the monitor count down
in polite green blips.
She opens one eye,
the old leopard eye,
and for a second I brace for the claws,
for the remark that will slice the room in half
like it always did.

Nothing comes.
Just a dry click in her throat,
a sound like a drawer closing on empty.

Outside, the parking lot oaks drop their last leaves
the way people drop truths at deathbeds:
too late, too loud, too yellow.

Somebody’s cousin cries in the hallway
for reasons she can’t explain,
the way you cry at gas stations sometimes
when the song on the radio remembers your childhood
before you had to become the adult who tolerates monsters
because they share your last name.

We say she’s “comfortable,”
the way we say “it’s fine”
when the roof leaks and the dog dies
and the bank calls again.
Fine.
Comfortable.
Still breathing.
That’ll have to do.

The mistake of her life didn’t redeem anyone.
It just happened,
a long, slow flat tire on the highway of ordinary days,
and here we are,
pulled over on the shoulder,
waiting for the end of the noise.

The nurse says she’s “transitioning.”
Translation:
the warranty’s expired
and nobody’s coming to pick up the broken appliance.
We nod, grateful for the clinical word.

A sibling cries in the hallway,
ugly gulping sobs
because finally, finally
the monster is too weak to bite
and it turns out forgiveness
is just another word for exhaustion.

We stand there
holding our useless flowers
and our useless grudges
like the world’s worst bouquet.

Later, someone will say
“at least she’s at peace.”
Bullshit.
She’s wherever people go
when they’ve spent a lifetime
making sure nobody else ever was.

God bless us, every one,
the ones who stayed
and the ones who only came
because somebody had to sign the papers.
God bless us, every one,
especially the ones
who have to keep living
with what she left inside us,
sharp as fishhooks
and twice as hard to swallow.

We’re still here, aren’t we?
The world keeps turning
its indifferent, beautiful shoulder.
That’ll have to do.

J. Alan Nelson, a writer, journalist and actor, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay,” the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld,” and narrated New York Times videos on AIDS programs in Africa.