“For Angela” – Short Fiction, Pt. 1

A woman, Angela, lies sedated on a hospital bed, her eyes closed. Her frizzy, gray hair lays greased and flaccid on her head. A man, Richard, sits on a metal folding chair at Angela’s side, his balmy hands clutching her left, a hand hanging loosely like a strung fish. A silver, unadorned rosary hangs from the clump of hands on the edge of the bed. His eyes are splotched and red, but even if he felt tempted to look anywhere but her wrinkled face, nothing else in the room would hold his attention for long. The room’s plain beige walls do little to make the room feel any bigger than it is. Other than a tan overnight bag on the floor near the bed, the room is spartan and the air smells of disinfectant. Blue sky filters in through the window, but the day is cold. The season’s first batch of sub-freezing temperatures has frozen over Lake Towhee, a body of water that rests within view of Angela’s tenth floor window. During the summer, the lake is home to tubers, skiers, and other water adventurers. But now, fishermen, bundled up in black, knee-length parkas and red stocking caps, tempt fate by dragging their sleds and tools out onto the lake for the first time this season. From the window, they look like miniature figurines moving in half motion, figurines unaware of the blitzkrieg underway in this tenth floor hospital room.

In what to Richard seems to have been only yesterday, the scourge sprouted from her colon and stomped its way through the rest of her body. It all happened so quickly that the scourge had penetrated so deeply and launched into the lymph nodes to metastasize the pancreas before she could even begin to think about the Christmas cards she would not be sending out that year. Though the two are in their early eighties and have each lived in ways most people could only dream about, the man cannot help but silently curse God because he feels she has been taken too early. Not again, he thinks.