Half-Remembered, Fully Felt

The beginning of a story I've been writing over winter break, heavily inspired by Dave Eggers's novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, as well as events from my own life.

            Through the small window behind the stained wraparound curtain – stained with what looked like either coffee or a case of Montezuma’s revenge, Brook wasn’t sure – the November ground looked frosty and crystalline-looking.  Like the way ice cream gets in the freezer when you don’t touch it for months.  Winter wasn’t even a month away and already the ground was turning to ice cream, with a little grass for garnish.

            Brook’s mother let out a moan, one free of any intonation.  He couldn’t tell whether it was a moan of pain, or of grief, or of something else.  What something else?  People don’t moan under favorable circumstances.  Unless it’s an orgasm.  A really climactic, get-the-camera-rolling-it’s-the-money-shot orgasm.
            “Nurse!” he yelled into the hallway.
            His mother had been cycling in and out of consciousness as if she were running laps.  Brook had alternated day and night shifts with his twin sister Andi (imagine the confusion of their A.M. kindergarten teacher when she had taken a roll call on the first day of school) since their mother had stopped eating five days ago.  Andi had come in for the first day, while he had taken over that night – since Andi had a husband and two kids to look after and what in the hell did Brook at age twenty-five without a college degree have to show for himself?
            He had a plastic cup of cinnamon applesauce he poured into a little styrofoam bowl.  He held the spoon to her mouth.  “Eat up, Mom.”
            Mom made no gesture, no indication that she was even aware of his presence.  Nothing.

            Nurse Rhonda came in, a stout black woman whose purple scrubs made her look like a distant cousin of Barney the dinosaur.  “You called?”
            Brook was surprised she had reported.  He was used to waiting minutes that turned to hours that turned to what seemed like centuries for the women at the nursing home to come by, trotting at the speed of toddlers, with their squeaky food and medicine carts full of mauve-colored trays that were bizarrely shaped like UFOs and probably doubled as bedpans.
            “She’s crying out.  Maybe she needs more morphine.”
            “I already gave her the dosage the doctor told me.  Sure she ain’t just trying to tell you somethin’?”
            Gee, maybe I’m in utter agony and wish your useless ass would put me out of my fucking misery something?
            “Well, I think maybe a few more milligrams will do the trick.  It would make me feel more comfortable.”

            “I don’t think the law or my job bends for what makes you comfortable, Mister Stanton.  ‘Fraid you’ll have to talk to the doctor when he gets here in the morning.”  She stomped merrily back to her cart – “I’ll take her food tray though” – and continued down the hallway – stomp, stomp, stomp – like a good dinosaur.
            Brook took a seat in the wheelchair his mother had used when she was still mobile.  He wished he and his sister could’ve pulled together the funds last year to send their mother to Westhaven, the unequivocally more glorious convalescent home on the other side of town (because whatever’s the better of two options is always on the other side of town; don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise).  But Mom had spent most of the government pensions she had received since their father’s death on vodka and cigarettes and barely had enough left over for a stick of gum, let alone a nursing home that wouldn’t be in every way perpetually execrable.

            Furthermore, Mom’s Medicaid kicked in late, and most of the first three months of nursing-home-rent ended up coming out of Andi’s pocket, to her made-very-known chagrin.
            “So, I’m paying half a thousand a month for a woman who probably didn’t spend half a thousand on me for my entire childhood?” 
            “Well, I’ll pitch in a hundred or so.  Whatever I can scrape up.  Odd jobs here and there.  So you’ll probably end up breaking even.”

            Andi worked as a patient care tech at the community hospital to get herself through nursing school.  Her husband, Steve, was a nurse at the same hospital.  At times Brook wondered why the two didn’t just take Mom in and save everyone the trouble of having to stop by every other day to see if her meals were finally being delivered on time and whether or not she won the week’s round of Bingo and got to add a little something to her forty-five-dollars-a-week allowance, and to drive around town to spend that allowance on a twelve-pack of beer or some other hopeless expenditure like a new pair of socks that could never be allowed to travel to the building’s laundry unit, otherwise known as the Land-of-Say-Hasta-La-Vista-to-Your-Underpants.

            There was an old Sylvania television unit – TV was too modern of a term for it – in the corner of the room beyond the track that the curtain ran on.  A crappy soap opera was playing on mute – probably something the nurses watched when they came in to deliver meals two hours late.  These shows were only fun if women were beating the hell out of each other in their kitchens or swimming pools, which they were not.  Brook switched the channel haphazardly to a tabloid news channel airing a documentary on Courtney Love.  He gave up and turned the television unit off.

            His mother had gone through phases like this in the past, since she had been diagnosed with COPD.  She would give up talking first, so that no one could be sure of the problem at hand to do anything to assuage it.  Then she would give up eating, no matter how many bowls of peaches and cottage cheese and cups of 7-Up were placed on the wheeled table at her bedside.  Then she would zone in and out of reality – either an effect of malnourishment or a futile means of willing herself to die – no one was completely sure.  “They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me,” she would sometimes say, which in that hellhole was never entirely ruled out as a possibility in Brook’s mind.  This time wasn’t much different than the others.

            The door creaked open; Andi had arrived with last week’s laundry.  It had become increasingly difficult to change their mother since she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) move of her own volition, so the nurses had been leaving her in diapers and nightgowns that could easily be taken off and put back on.  Most of her wardrobe she had shrunk out of; while she had weighed about one-hundred-fifty pounds the year before, give or take, she was now a kind ninety.  Skin hung off in her arms and thighs like Grecian drapes.
            “How is she?  Said anything?”
            “No, but I’m sure that when she does,” Brook got up from the wheelchair, “it will be something glorious.”

Country Rain

His grandfather had owned a farm
Far from the city bustle, where
Easter eggs were cleverly hidden
in the nooks of trees.
Some were found, and placed in
wicker baskets filled with plastic grass.
Others were left to rot.
One boy, clad in overalls, didn't eat eggs,
so he threw them at his grandfather's ducks,
one by one, because back then he
didn't know anything about pain.

Sixteen years had passed,
and the boy, now grown,
drove his pickup truck through
that country town,
in search of his late grandfather's farmhouse.
It rained and rained,
and even with his road map in one hand,
and a cup of cheap coffee in the other,
he didn't know the address.
Somewhere in those creeping provinces,
that house surely still stood.
Perhaps he had already passed it.