lying on a hospital bed exhausted, body like a crime scene, in the dim two women are slowly wringing out warm water from cloths over me. turns out i’m still there, underneath it all.

today, lying on my back in the dark, she came over and took each of my ankles in hand and gently tugs and shakes them. i had a vision behind my closed eyes: a field of wildflowers. they are purple.

when my back was aching i would wrap my arms across my narrow chest and hold each shoulder with the opposite hand and then he would lift me feet off the ground by my braced arms. hanging there, it took one little shift of the hips and then my spine would make a staccato cracking like someone popping a strip of caps, remember that baby gun smoke smell when they did? the smell of summer and childhood. then he would drop me, horrified and i would have to promise it didn’t hurt. like everything else we did this often until we didn’t, at all.