Vigil

by Joe Casey

joe_casey_writer-mail@yahoo.com

Whick! the scythe whispers, descending across the prairie grass, scattering golden jewels to wind and memory.

—

You jolt awake to midnight and a pulse of rain against glass. You didn’t mean to sleep; you look over at him and there’s no change. He lies there still on his tousled catafalque, connected to your world only by a farrago of cables and tubing. Chilled air perfuses the room with an antiseptic tang.

You stand and pinch the bridge of your nose, turn to the window and the space beyond. No joy there, either; three walls like this one confound you with a chessboard of dark and lighted windows, other lives playing out behind them. The sky is a wet, torn, grey sheet bounded by the parapet; the ground is a lower building’s roof, clotted by a forest of pipes and machinery.

You go to him, to the machine next to him, numbers and graphs an incomplete calculus of this life, his life; the colored lines are nearly flat, Appalachian, serpentine.

You look down at him, at his face which is your face but for the span of some thirty years. Not unhandsome, you think; a kind face, one given easily to laughter, enough to enchant your mother gone but five years, enough to enchant your own wife.

Always, always, he’d run before you, beautiful and fearless and strong, taking you both by the hand, showing you the stuff of life and of living.

—

Your brother is here, at the door, bumping backwards through it with coffees for you both; he hands you one as you stare down, unspeaking, at your father, recumbent.

Strange, at fifty, to think yourself an orphan when he goes; you smile at the absurdity.

—

You chart the course of his life in the seamed topography of his face, in the mole-pocked and pallid flesh of his arms, in his stertorous breathing. He is diminished, here, in this setting; you remember watching the nurse attend to him, how insubstantial he’d seemed, how absent.

—

There is a change, now, as you watch, a rustling of cloth against cloth as he moves, as his head arches back, as his eyes jink under closed lids, as his clawed hand unclenches, rises up into the air between you.

You cry, now, not from grief—you’ll climb that harrowing wall later—but from fear of the numinous and the unknown. Once again, he runs before you, into some other country of light or dark. You take his hand—not to keep him here; you cannot do that—but because you want him to show you one last time that which is not yet yours to know.

—

Whick! she whispers, flensing soul from flesh.