Tree
Old man dying. Shrinking into his own essence. Oxygen lifelines bubbling through water like the springs of eternity. Tubes, pills of every colour, food cut so small a mouse could swallow it.
Young woman alive. Earthbrown, her skin as warm as duskwater. She has eyes of fresh green leaves. Limbs like a stand of eucalyptus.
The room is shuttered to a penumbra against the warm afternoon sunlight. The air is a green broth bubbling. Low sounds from a radio in the corner are fish swimming. The world outside, the world the man is dying from, lurches by in a mixmaster of small sounds. The girl, a friend of the family, leaves the world on the doorstep with her sandals when she comes to sit with the old man; the house falls silent as the habitual occupants go out for errands and relief.
The arm of the old man rests on the arm of the chair where he sits. The chair is a dark-padded throne with a tall cushioned back against which his head lolls. The young woman sits on the cool tile floor and rests her earthcheek on the pale stringy arm of the old man dying. The white curls on his forearm catch at the heavy strands of dark hair.
How you feeling Gramp? Everyone calls him Gramp, even his children.
Fine. His lips hardly move, the word is a bleat.
Had your lunch? She raises her head to speak, her hair falling to cover his hand with dark gold.
He lifts his old head slowly, white hair tangled with the oxygen tubes and straps. Peers into her green leaves.
When. I was. Young. I ate. Girls. Like you for. Lunch.
The words sputter through the oxygen bubbles, explode in the air.
The green leaves tremble with laughter.
Before lunch Gramp? Or after lunch? Brown voice gurgles.
Slowly, he lifts his hand. Taps her on the cheek. For lunch, he burps. For.
She giggles, Oh Gramp, and lays her head back down in the cup of the old man’s hand on the arm of the chair. A shoulder rests on his bony pyjamaed knee.
A wave of breath lifts his chest into a small eruption of rheumy coughing. The sickness is now encamped on his shoulders, surrounding his chest, closing in on his throat.
You okay Gramp? She uncoils, green eyes opening wide, revealing clouds.
He pats her arm. Yes.
She subsides. The clouds part. Want me to comb your hair?
Not. Yet.
Rub your back?
Ahhhh.
She stands. Is tall, but seems still to be growing. The green leaf-fire of her glows in the dark room.
The old man, creaking forward, allows her to lift his pyjama shirt. His flesh is pale, a soft delta of blue veins running between discoloured splotches of sickness. Her long brown fingers, gliding on an unguent of balm, push wavelets of skin this way and that. In the green soupy air the old man dying sighs. It is the breathing of the sea. Ahhhh.
You’re just a big baby Gramp, you know that?
He sighs again, a wave that has come a long way.
I am a. Prisoner.
Nice cell, she quips.
Only thing. A breath lifts his body beneath her calm gliding hand. I don’t know my. Date of. Release.
Fingers pause, resting like boats on the breathing sea. Commercial voices crackle and chirp on the old man’s radio. From somewhere deeper in the house another radio raises a hymn on a woman’s voice, feathery with hope, too distant for words.
Her voice is clouded. I don’t know either Gramp.
She stops, holds his head from behind. Leans over the back of the chair, going on tiptoe, and rests her chin in the white tangle of hair.
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genius. i relived that…and many days like it, as if it was yesterday.