Maren Will Be Right with You
A couple months ago I wouldn’t scoffed at the idea that this could be done but now I believe it, or I am growing towards believing it. We were eking our way up a steep road, calves straining, breathing so very inefficiently, boggling at our poor locomotion. My chest hurt and I wondered if I ought to be exerting myself like this. It was probably not what I thought it was. No sense in daydreaming about it.
The road was uneven and I kept stumbling in potholes. There was an anomalous cactus growing outside someone’s fence and a tiny robin perched on a plow serving as a lawn ornament. I stopped to calm my ragged breathing and bent to feel the thick cactus pad, and I thought about nopales, slimy nopales and salty white cheese and a limey corn tortilla. It was a few minutes before I noticed the cactus needles in my thumb, needling in spite of the apparently smooth rubber of the cactus. I spent a few miles walking up and then down while rubbing absentmindedly at them until I decisively ripped them out with my thumbnail. There.
But before that I was trying to ignore ill premonitions about what the strain of my bra meant while I was also streaming sweat and transforming my whole body into a single lung. It wouldn’t matter either way, I reasoned, it wouldn’t have any effect. It could be anything. This time, though, it could be that. I had actually seized upon the proximity of death to keep going back, first just a few minutes and then a few months, a few months before the signs started appearing, back to when there was still a possibility, and so they did it and now she was back here, feeling swollen and giddy and deeply worried in advance.
The air was actually a texture, and it was displeasing within her face and down into her lungs even though it was not cold. He was glum, ever glum and silent next to her and the sun flamed their faces. She wanted to undo his glumness, she wanted to proclaim this inkling so very prematurely, but she knew it would make the sadness worse when it turned out not to be true, and more so if it turned out to be true and then not true. For now, she would worry her giddiness and run along the edge of ill hysteria, thinking about being bedridden and forcibly pushed into a round of thrumming miserable pain for hours that would not pass. She thought about crowning him with dandelions and violets from the side of the road, of wiping the glumness for good. The thought placated the hysteria creature and they walked peaceably.
I still don’t know for certain if I believe what I did was true or if it was just an idea I thought about vividly, maybe in a dream or while trying to decide how I would solve this thing, as if it were in my hands. The memory of hanging out around the hospital, of going to the homes of people who were known to be at their end, it was too vivid to be made up, as was the clarity of being back at our old place just a little while before, in the uncorrected glare of the bathroom light, of the fullness of things, of the rough tiles beneath my feet.
