-7 days
She only complained about her pain to the doctors
and even then, dispassionately –
the disembodied, factual pain
of a radiology report
My back is on fire whenever I move, she said
the words condensing as they passed through her icy lips.
Hydromorphone, doctor said.
-6 days
Whoever was up first would roll the potty seat next to her bed
and wrap her limbs over their shoulders like the straps of a backpack
to hoist her onto the turquoise plastic seat,
trying not to pull up her gown
but we did sometimes –
the muffled yellow flowers giving way to
purple bruises like little opalescent oil spills.
-4 days
We baked her buttermilk biscuits
per her recipe – handwritten in cryptic coils.
We had to guess the oven temp (375) but they came out just fine,
layered like golden brown mounds of sandstone.
She broke one in half with shaking fingers,
revealing its rare white belly,
then placed it back on the plate.
Delicious, she said.
-3 days
We went to the used bookstore on Wiley Ave
because Anne Marie said she had breathed her own breath twice
and it was time to get out of the apartment
for a bit.
Laminated wood straining with a collage of paperbacks –
lives’ works strung cover to cover into a single twisting tale.
I brought her back a Flannery O’Connor book
with a faintly familiar title.
Her thin wrists buckled under its weight.
Oh, I’ll never have time to finish this one, she said.
-2 days
the duffels patient by the front door.
We encircled the bed,
ogling the body now more grotesque sculpture than her,
skin once inflated with cheese grits and lemon pound cake
now hanging from a xylophone of ribs,
scorpion tail spine primed to snap.
‘allison has school and chris has the regional tournament
and gene is going to jacksonville for business – that meeting
with the distributor – and carrie is out of sick days and I have to
drive allison, but maya will be here to take care of you and we’ll
be back next week’ Anne Marie said.
She was still for a moment longer,
hair permanently matted flat in the back,
until her eyes cracked at the corners
and the fury of grief rushed into her limbs.
Tears dribbled from her chin
and muscles jerked on the ends of their fibers.
Don’t leave me here alone, she wailed
her words rippling with
the opposite of resilience.
Sophie Liebergall is an MS2 at the Perelman School of Medicine.
