Vetter

One of the nurses hung up rows of small white lights that made shadows which stretched upwards into an array of strange colossuses. Green links of electric party streamers ran across the walls, held in place by fingernail sized staples. Confetti lay on the floor in pathetic, lame puddles. It was New Year’s Eve. On television, that small rabbit box with the world tinkling on inside, he could see conglomerates of people drunk with change. Purified by noise alone. A garden of young, fleeting hope spread across the hard stomach of New York City. He briefly noted that the Isrealites might have looked similar, surrounding that golden calf made of molten and erected from a godless disparaging. All those lives ago. He relayed this thought in passing to his mother who sat to his side in her favorite chair, the beige cushion split open from years of use. She raised her eyebrows, surprised. What do you know about that? After all, he was her beloved shut in. Shut in because he was beloved, beloved because he could not leave. But he knew things. Like the distinct call of a northern cardinal. That deep, full fledged flit. What gasses Saturn smoldered with. Who won the tennis French Open with a spectacular topspin. What the girls were wearing out there as they crossed avenues and kissed lawyers beneath swiveling bar lights. He knew, also, that he was going to die. Not that evening. Not in the morning. But in the flush of time that stood before him like the lake that dares the fisherman. Somewhere between the fluid drips and commercials. Like a stain beneath bleach he would dissolve into the milky pool of afterlife. Into that sea of untouched space. No matter what awaited him—God in his silks, dead stars placing bets, a field of stalking poppies, the coldest light—he wasn’t afraid. He would go. And he would never end.