In the Fik of it

I have no idea how they got there, all I know is that every time she drops her arm a few more fall out onto the floor.   The floor in fact, seems covered with the things.   Bethany has a tendency to land more food on the floor than between her lips and tonight is no exception.   The French fried onions, always a favorite have somehow infiltrated her clothing. She wears that oversized, hooded sweatshirt and with her straight-cut, jet-black hair, looks more like a Lutheran friar than a teenaged girl.   Like a friar, she too has something up her sleeve; onions.   She eats them with the zeal of a bulldog, landing more on the floor than in her mouth. She seems annoyed by the dust buster that I use to suck up the onions that keep falling on the floor.   She looks at me, nuzzles the hose of the unit with her calloused right hand, shakes her left arm again like a duck ruffling its wings, and produces still more fries.   I took her baggy sleeve an...

I watched a loved one die today. It was nothing like in the movies, nothing like what I’ve read in novels.   It was neither glorious nor peaceful, exciting nor frightening, there was no opening of the heavens, loud voices or gaseous paranormal activity.   It was in fact, nothing.   She was there one moment and gone the next.   She went from a wonderful mother and dear friend to a stiff and lifeless form that had little visible resemblance to the person I’d known all these years. When I arrived, I could see her struggling for breath through a dark hole surrounded by taught, grey cheekbones and my first thought was “good thing I didn’t stop and get gas in the car first” .   The tragedy in that thought, as shallow as it is, lies in the fact that had I stopped, She’d have been gone before I keyed the debit number into the pump.   Trading gas for life – that’s how bizarre this all is. As I approached the bedside, I could only feel pain for m...