This piece of flash fiction was written in class last week. The prompt was a few lines from a poem, describing the heart.
Priscilla — woman who dies; mother of Jeffrey
Jeffrey — estranged son of Priscilla, married to Nancy.
An unnamed dog
Unnamed EMTs
*** ***
It is a pump, a muscle, a churning engine, delivering blood and oxygen. The tasty foods of a lifetime line its pipes with plaque. Genetics has a hand. One day it will seize and though she expected it, its refusal to continue will shock her.
No tunnels of light. No slideshow of memory. Just a clamping pressure that will not let her breathe. No more breath.
Lying on the floor, clutching her shoulder, there will be no one near to offer compressions, no paramedic with electric paddles to try and shock that muscle back into a working rhythm.
Her last thought was typical of her — criticism, bordering on complaint. She thought, I wish this would go a little faster.
The silence that follows her last breath is not golden, secret, rich, or even personal. It’s a blank page that is not in a hurry. Whether another actor comes along with ink and turmoil isn’t of any concern to the blank page – it could hold its absences indefinitely.
But a dog climbs up the stairs. Noses the body in desperate repetition. He howls. He howls and a little spit lands on the face of his friend. She does not move, his friend.
By the time any human notices that Priscilla is gone, her body will be cold and past rigor mortis. Had she been alive to count the endless hours, she’d have felt a mighty sense of grievance, but since grievance is allotted only to the living, the discovery of her body is a mechanical matter. Not her business. Doctor to pronounce death, certified documents to be signed, the gurney to be hoisted up the narrow, definitely not-to-code staircase.
“At least she’s not a 300-pounder,” one of the EMTs remarks. A Worcester pick up the prior weekend had necessitated employing extra hands, revving up the extra wide van, and hauling out the reinforced gurney. Some people impose all manner of inconvenience, even after they’re gone.
No, Priscilla (they’ve been trained to avoid calling corpses “it” or “the body”), no, Priscilla is a scrawny old bird and all of the men secretly wonder how a heart attack felled one so rail thin.
Priscilla is incinerated according to her wishes. The son she hadn’t talked to in 13 years took care to contact the life insurance company and a realtor days before he arranged to turn her into ash.
Making her wait satisfied him. Being in charge of her body felt like retribution, one that offered scant justice, but justice nonetheless. She waited in one of those stainless steel, chilled drawers at the morgue.
While on hold with State Street Bank, Jeffrey, though not given to thinking abstractly, thought that a cramped and chilly dark drawer was a pretty good metaphor for his childhood.
Will he tell Nancy about the metaphor when he gets back to Houston? No. No. Because she would then insist on details and when your survival strategy has been to move on, never look back, supplying metaphorical details is not in your playbook.
But being in Priscilla’s house, talking to her insurance agent, her estate planner, and going through her papers and drawers makes his blank-slate-approach unworkable. Unworkable. He will have to confront his past whether he likes it or not and his stupid belief that all the hundreds of thousands of dollars coming his way would offer a kind of balancing pleasure was wrong, wrong, wrong.
