by James Warren Boyd
Though the Laguna Beach hospital was familiar to me, the ICU was not. The entrance seemed like something out of a Cold War spy thriller, with its doubled-paned glass on thick doors, flat rectangle of steel covering the lock case, flashing lights, and wall-mounted phone. I picked up the handset, identified myself as the son of Eva Marie Boyd—so strange to use any name other than “Mother”—and was admitted with a loud buzz and the metallic thunk of the door being unbolted. The nurses’ station directed me to a room across from their administrative island. When I walked in, my Dad looked up me, his eyes puffy and swollen, and then back at my mother. I followed his gaze. A large tube, which stretched one corner of her half-opened mouth, jerked and hissed to initiate her chest’s rise and fall. I approached the bed and reached for her hand, getting tangled in the wire clipped to her forefinger. Continue reading
Hawaii Pacific Review 