Circling Vultures
Matthew Amundsen
Spring 2010
Spring 2010
She brought the brats with her today. I could hear the lot of them sniveling in the doorway. Underneath the mechanical rasp of the respirator, she and her brood whispered like rats as if I were already dead. Although I couldn’t see them, I knew well their faces with snot crusting their nostrils or slopping into their mouths, forgotten stains, grime and the kind of sweat that only fat produces, the kind generated by neglect and an over-reliance on convenience. Thankfully my eyes were sealed, and the tubes hooked into my face blockaded the stench.
The pilgrims shuffled over to hover at the foot of the bed, shivering with an animal’s instinct to bolt. What were they looking for? Couldn’t they see that nothing had changed? It was the same as yesterday and the days and weeks before that. I had gone from sick to suffering, from dying to almost dead. My body’s last act of defiance had left me treading water in suspended animation with neither an island nor a drowning in sight. Induced coma to keep the brain safe from the tumor, I’d never heard of anything so miserably ridiculous. They all thought I couldn’t hear them, that my brain didn’t function, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s my body that’s failed me, my body that doesn’t respond to my commands. My brain, on the other hand, works all too well.
They shifted nervously in the stale hospital quiet, one that’s never truly silent. I’ve tried escaping into it but the hums of the monitors and the clockwork pinions of medical perpetua always betray me to the angels of agony floating on memory wings.
Golden motes swam in the sunlight creeping through the cracks in the barn as Billy Harvest and I leapt from ladders into piles of straw years and years ago, before any of this. Bits of it stuck in our hair like parasites. Vistas of soil through the window and the horses stirring in their sleep beneath us. Smiles of pure ecstasy yet untouched by the worries of the modern world and Billy said, “I could do this forever.” But that was our last summer and we never had the chance to prove his claim, not us, not there in that barn.
They assault me, memories. I can’t run anymore, and they bully me in my incapacitation. The things I’ve done, the things I haven’t. Death teases me, sharpens his scythe on my neck but refuses to harvest.
I wished I could shout “Boo!” and scare them all shitless once before croaking.
“When’s Grandpa gonna die?” The eldest at twelve.
Not soon enough, piggy.
“Toby, don’t say that.” A quiver in her voice as she sniffed back tears. She wasn’t any kind of example. No wonder they didn’t listen to her.
“Toby was just asking a question, Mom.” Ashley, Toby’s younger accomplice in junk food and laziness and who, like her brother, bore calloused thumbs.
“I know he was, but that was disrespectful.”
“Sorry, Mom.” Forcing a fake one to get it over with.
“That’s okay, Toby.” She smeared gobs from her nose with the tissue she’d likely been clutching since they’d left the house.
“So when’s Grandpa gonna win a gold medal at the Olympics?”
“Toby!”
It was too late for reprimands. The blob had gotten his sister to laugh, and there was no way she could rein them in now. They pranced around the room in what was surely a reenactment of the Summer Games.
“You two just wait until we get home.” Crossly, as if not to disturb my rest, but merely an aftershock of the grumbling earthquake her grandfather had been, a man born to work the earth in his own likeness.
Little fingers pushed back my lids, bringing light to my eyes. The youngest, I was sure. This one I didn’t know so well. She had never even told me who his father was. Called her pregnancy a blessing in disguise, but Marion Baumgardener’s daughter had seen her before that at the honky-tonk flirting with a couple of truck drivers. The things you have to hear from other people about your own.
That first spineless sack of manure of hers had left her for a younger woman after twelve years of marriage, and I had told her it was her fault. She was lucky he hadn’t left before. I didn’t blame him. Not even a saint would stay.
“Ruston, get off Grandpa!” Took her long enough to notice.
She plucked him from my chest, and the squirrel bawled until she put him on the floor. Reaching to close my eyes, she lost the nerve and so they stayed staring blankly at the hospital wall.
“Toby, you and Ashley go down to the lobby and get some ice cream, okay?” In her purse she dug for a few crumpled bills and some change to reward them for their atrocious behavior.
“I wanna go.” Ruston, pleading grabby fingers.
“You’re gonna stay here with Mommy.”
“Ice cream.”
“Bring some back for Ruston, kids!”
But they were gone, past echoes down the hall.
The doctor followed in their wake. Probably carried a clipboard, wore a stethoscope around his neck because people expected him to hear their hearts. “Miss Rathskin?”
“Yes?”
“May I speak with you a moment?”
“Please.”
“Your father isn’t responding well to our treatments.”
She started crying and the doctor was probably as embarrassed for her as I was.
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