Ligaments, death

Scott Ferry

I popped my knee she stated too calmly on the phone. She fell near the top of the run with our daughter feet away and slowly trudged her way up twenty yards with her skis to the patrol station. By the time I flew down the run and rode the chair up she reclined in the patrolman’s sled, wrapped in an orange blanket. She always told me that knee wasn’t right. Her face shone a smile of someone who has felt many impacts, and much unjust weightlessness. The smile said, of course this happened to me. Lani’s eyes sifted inward like sandtraps in oil. I explained, They are going to take her down and take care of her in their office. She asked, Is she going to have surgery there? Is she going to die?

Just recently our daughter realized that the Epi-pen that we carried with us was not going to kill her, but open her airway. We thought we had explained it many times. She had twirled herself up in our moon-gray curtains and sang, I am dead I am a ghost. We told her, No, no, do not say that. Last summer when she entered the threshold of Space Mountain for the first time she stated, Well, ok, I’m not afraid to die as if she had wrestled with the moment of actual death all night and had resigned her body freely, wistfully. As if she remembered what it was like to fly through stars.

No, no surgery today. She is not going to die. Let’s ski down and meet her. She didn’t cry, but her eyes kept inverting into dark pools, glinting matter on the other side of matter, as if she could see the edges, or the glowing gum the ghosts had stuck under the bones of the world.