#230: "Growth" by Amy Yelin

~This essay was previously published in The Gettysburg Review (2005).

I bring my father a slice of pizza and an orange soda in a grease-stained paper bag.  He is the only person in the surgery waiting room this evening.  A ghost room. He looks smaller than usual, dwarfed by the oversized sofa, his head slumped toward his chest, as if he were sleeping. Or praying. He eats greedily, and then we make our usual small talk. “How is your car?” he asks. “Your job?” He tells me again what is wrong with the state of health care in America. There are awkward pauses. We go outside so he can smoke his pipe.

“Six hours we waited,” he says, striking match after match as the wind taunts and blows them out. Finally one catches. He holds it to the rim of the pipe, and I see that familiar orange glow of fire. “The surgeon didn’t even call to update us. Six hours after we were scheduled, he just showed up. No explanation or anything.” My father sucks on his pipe as though it were a pacifier; the sound is like fish talking. We sit in silence for a while, on a stone ledge in front of the hospital.  The trees appear sinister, their branches reaching out, pointing at us, like skeleton fingers. I pretend I am cold so we can go inside.

When the surgeons finally come out, they look tired. The one my father and I think resembles Harry Potter assures us the prognosis is good.

“I think we got most of the growth,” he says. “There are just a few little dots left. Nothing that the chemo won’t take care of.”  He tells us he expects a full remission. Such confidence.

For the next six months, we are all obsessed with the word remission. It is our promised land, our mirage in the distance, our savior.

#229: "Like Everyone Else" by Tara Laskowski

~This story was previously published in Fiction Weekly (2009).  

It was after the teenage girl died that Samantha Wolewski finally agreed to go out on a date with Harry, the cops reporter who worked night shift. Up until then she’d been dodging him—she was the new obit clerk, her first job out of college, and she wanted to be professional, make a good impression.

But then the girl died. It was a car accident—she had been on her way home from the hairdresser to get ready for her prom that night. Before that, Samantha had only had to write obituaries for old people. There was something about this girl’s picture— a dark-haired young girl looking over her shoulder, smiling brightly, hopefully into the camera. Sam wondered if the girl had hated the picture, if she’d hated the one lock of hair that had separated from the rest and trailed along her red sweater like a snake.

She tried to tell Harry about it on their way to the casino. What happened to the young woman’s date for the prom, her friends? “Would they still even have the prom after that?” she wondered aloud, to which Harry replied with a long, drawn-out story about his senior prom and how wasted they’d gotten afterwards on the second floor of the Red Roof Inn off of I-81.

“How romantic,” Sam murmured, already regretting her moment of weakness that had gotten her here in the car with the only guy in the newsroom who didn’t sing karaoke at happy hour on Friday nights. It bothered her that Harry incessantly cracked his gum. It bothered her he had yet to ask her a question about herself. It bothered her she couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

#228: "Stewards of the Dead" by Susan E. Gunter

~This poem previously appeared in Atlanta Review (2015).

~Selected by Clara Jane Hallar, assistant editor for poetry

                                   

I watch them circle above me, wings

like open pages curving slightly

from the spine, a kettle of royalty

attended by a page, a lone hawk

hoping for scraps from their carrion,

a bit of flesh or shredded muscle.

A wake of them undertakes to clean

the world of waste, their wings caressing

leaf mold as they feast on the fallen,

leaving a heap of knackered bones,

odd tufts of fur for the devil’s cloak.

In Brazilian myth, vultures’ wings

blocked the light until the hero captured

their king. Man and bird compromised:

divide the world in two, sun and moon.

Gods of darkness, death, and terror, take pity.

Spare me another hour, a jeweled sunrise—

keep me from the tower of silence,

for I have not yet finished with words.

*****

#227: "Out for a Walk" by Eric D. Goodman

~This story was previously published in The Baltimore Review (2007).

            Last night they’d eaten fried chicken in their urban row house.  The chicken bones remained in his bowl, a skeleton of awful beauty, meat and veins still dangling. 

Now, Thurber’s head rested against Lindsey’s thigh.  He lifted it, looked up into her eyes, and put his head into her lap with the wisp of a sound, almost a whimper.  Lindsey put her hand on the crown of his skull and gently stroked his brown-black coat.  Thurber’s chocolate eyes looked ahead, floated up toward Lindsey, and returned to the blurred blankness ahead as she petted him.  Lindsey’s hand was heavy and slow.

            “You’re a good boy.”  The mellow muttering was sincere, but not entirely true.  If that were true, we wouldn’t be in this mess, Lindsey thought, and then hated herself for thinking it.