Page 27 - Vol. V #6

to reach and rip the tube out of his throat. He tries to shout and the only thing his lifeless body produces are silent tears to run into his ears. His ears itch. He can’t scratch them. It is torture, this existence, a horror moment by moment. This could be hell. When he is exhausted he falls into a fitful sleep.
When he wakens to his new hell, Aaron, Josh, and Deb are playing a board game on the tray table over his bed. One game is called Scotland Yard, and he comes to understand that it is an elabo- rate and slow game of children’s chase across
a map of London streets. The one being chased wears a black visor with a white X on it. Delmas is not included in the game, not that he could par- ticipate, but they don’t even look his way.
“The deer makes its way across the front yard, nosing for
hickory nuts, stepping gingerly like Lillian would, across the frozen drive- way in her heels.”
Women from some church come into his room and sing hymns from an old blue Baptist hymnal. They chat with his kids and ask if they can pray, and to Delmas’s great surprise the kids—almost militant in their atheism—let the women pray.
Nurses bathe him; they turn him over and clean his bottom like a baby’s. One of them is a black woman who is rough with him, and yells as if he’s deaf. His heart fills with fear every time she enters the room. She has a tattoo on the inside of her wrist that says BELL, a sloppy amateur tat- too, what they called prison tattoos in Delmas’s day. She is not a nurse. She changes his diapers. Precious little comes out of him now that he’s being feed through this tube, but what does leak out is messy and wet–he can still smell. He is not ashamed. He is not embarrassed. He views this old broken body with the same curiosity that his grandsons, when they visit, now do. He sleeps and dreams of Lillian—it’s the summer after they were married. She wears the floral print sun- dress she loved, yellow flowers with fat brown centers. She holds a sweating glass of white wine. Loud talk and laughter, the smell of charcoal grill smoke. A breeze blows; the dress clings to her body, outlining her then perfect breasts.
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