Life in Drips and Sputters
2
There is music in this place.
Notes in somber, inflexible rhythm, embracing a season of lament. There is no sheet music to this composition. Funeral marches form grooves in the dirt, not lines on a page. But this dirge, reserved for burial, instead accompanies the living. The tools of life support conduct a morbid symphony, metered pings and beeps without alteration, setting a dismal pace to shave the edges from her nerves.
The instrument of his being is the method of her dismantling.
Walls are bare, except for a false cheer to which time is prevented from adding the atmosphere of dust. A collage on cork board displays colorful messages on tiny squares, assembled in a brief moment of maddened optimism. A borrowed sister had wanted words of certainty to be the first thing he sees when he wakes. But she'd wanted a different target for his renewal.
They stopped adding notes ten years ago.
She stopped waiting for revival.
Cheerful ivory paint never brightens the darkened hour of her arrivals. Always under the inked sky. Always dodging those who care little of her reasons. Some old habit makes her look both ways, even in this place where both music and souls die long before the body. The new one, with a badge full of naivete she can't wait to jade, asks after the past. It is a name he's not heard because no one gives that sound flight.
That one thinks this one retired. He's not entirely wrong.
It is not mentioned that she still sees him, because the frequency has lessened with the passing of days and her potential. It is not mentioned that his hair has grayed at the temples, because that encroacher has never met her fingertips. It is not mentioned that his limbs on the bed make her choke, because they do not move.
The nurses position unresponsive legs, shift his head, check his lines and plugs. She curses their freedom to express such personal duty. They do not fail him. But they do her no service. Because they lay out the brain dead in the same position in which she'd found him.
The shame of her daily weakness stings only nominally less than that initial failure.
Another ten years and she'll only have a cork board to take home.