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NON F ICT ION
Everything Past Iron By Kerri Goers
It was a corner room with walls at odd angles, making the bed and adjacent chair a tight fit. The walls were painted a generic tan with peach undertones, the bland institutional color of hospitals, prisons, and schools, sold in bulk and one shade off from cement. The bathroom had a commode in the shower, metal handrails along the wall and next to the toilet, and three pull cords for emergencies, which struck me as excessive and then alarming. I sat in an oversized plastic upholstered recliner. My husband, Eric, lay on the bed, exhausted from a night in the emergency room and eighteen hours without food. His head was turned toward me, and I watched the violent percussive way his chest rose and fell, out of sync with the pulsating carotid of his neck. Loud beating rotors of a Life Flight drew my attention to the small window of our room. I watched the helicopter’s shadow flutter over the building. The beating rotors grew faint. Eric slept – oblivious to it all. He was in atrial fibrillation: a fast irregular beating of the atrium that is out of sync with the ventricles of the lower heart. It’s an inadequate heartbeat that doesn’t allow