The boils, they rose like battlegrounds.
They blitzkrieged over her back.
The drugs wreaked havoc with her thermostat; they scorched her, then froze, then paralyzed, and when she walked from bed she collapsed—her hair like a nest on the pillow, or feathers on the lawn, from the cat.
For Penny you could see it was betrayal. It was there in the green-gone eyes; and the worst was the sheer disappointment. How could she be let down like this, by the world and by her body?
Again, like The Odyssey and The Iliad, where gods would intervene—till something spiraled to catastrophe—so it was with here. She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself, and sometimes she even believed it. At best we soon were jaded:
The stupid light of hospital wards.
The souls of lovely nurses.
How I hated the way they walked:
The stockinged legs of matrons!
But some, you had to admire them—how we hated to love the special ones. Even now, as I punch what happened out, I’m grateful to all those nurses; how they lifted her in the pillows, like the breakable thing she was. How they held her hand and spoke to her, in the face of all our hatred. They warmed her up, put fires out, and like us, they lived and waited.
* * *
—
One morning, when the toll hit close to breaking point, Rory stole a stethoscope—taking something back, I guess—as our mother became an impostor. By then she was the color of jaundice, and never again the color she was. We’d come to know the difference by then, between yellowness and blond.
She held on to us by our forearms, or the flesh of our palms and our wrists. Again, the education—so easy to count the knuckles, and the bones in both of her hands. She looked out through the window, at the world so bright and careless.
* * *
—
It’s also a thing to see, when you see your father change.
You watch him fold in different places.
You see him sleep another way:
He leans forward onto the ward bed.
He takes air but doesn’t breathe it.
Such pressure all held within.
It’s something fatigued and trodden-looking, and clothes that sigh at the seams. Like Penny would never be blond again, our dad would lose his physique. They were the dying of color and shape. It’s not just the death of them you see when you watch a person dying.
* * *
—
But then—she’d make it out.
Somehow, she’d climb from all of it, and traverse the hospital doors. She’d go straight back to work, of course, though death was at her shoulder.
No more hanging from the power lines for that old guy.
Or draping round the fridge.
But he was always out there somewhere: