<\/span><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Young woman alive. Earthbrown, her skin as warm as duskwater. She has eyes of fresh green leaves. Limbs like a stand of eucalyptus.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n How you feeling Gramp? <\/em> Everyone calls him Gramp, even his children.<\/p>\n Fine. <\/em>His lips hardly move, the word is a bleat.<\/p>\n Had your lunch? <\/em>She raises her head to speak, her hair falling to cover his hand with dark gold.<\/p>\n He lifts his old head slowly, white hair tangled with the oxygen tubes and straps. Peers into her green leaves.<\/p>\n When. I was. Young. I ate. Girls. Like you for. Lunch.<\/em><\/p>\n The words sputter through the oxygen bubbles, explode in the air.<\/p>\n The green leaves tremble with laughter.<\/p>\n Before lunch Gramp? Or after lunch?<\/em> Brown voice gurgles.<\/p>\n Slowly, he lifts his hand. Taps her on the cheek. For lunch, <\/em>he burps. For.<\/em><\/p>\n She giggles, Oh Gramp, <\/em>and lays her head back down in the cup of the old man\u2019s hand on the arm of the chair. A shoulder rests on his bony pyjamaed knee.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You okay Gramp? <\/em>She uncoils, <\/em>green eyes opening wide, revealing clouds.<\/p>\n He pats her arm. Yes.<\/em><\/p>\n She subsides. The clouds part. Want me to comb your hair? <\/em><\/p>\n Not. Yet.<\/em><\/p>\n Rub your back?<\/em><\/p>\n Ahhhh.<\/em><\/p>\n She stands. Is tall, but seems still to be growing. The green leaf-fire of her glows in the dark room.<\/p>\n 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 <\/strong>of <\/strong>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.<\/em><\/p>\n You’re just a big baby Gramp, you know that? <\/em><\/p>\n He sighs again, a wave that has come a long way.<\/p>\n I am a. Prisoner.<\/em><\/p>\n Nice cell,<\/em> she quips.<\/p>\n Only thing. <\/em>A breath lifts his body beneath her calm gliding hand. I don’t know my. Date of. Release.<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2019s voice, feathery with hope, too distant for words.<\/p>\n Her voice is clouded. I don’t know either Gramp.<\/em><\/p>\n 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. You have. Classes?<\/em><\/p>\n Shakes her head, creating light with her hair. Finished for the day.<\/em><\/p>\n Ahhhh.<\/em><\/p>\n From outside birdsong dribbles through the window. A car swishes by, coming out of the quiet like a flash of colour.<\/p>\n He extricates his hand. Touches her chin. Like a ripe fruit her head falls slowly, accustomed, into the chalice of his hand, and he gently weighs it. She purrs.<\/p>\n His hands are strong still. They built the house he is dying in. And the chairs and the tables and the cabinets in it. All his long life he has made things of wood with these hands. He scorns plastic and veneer. His delight is in unmasking the patterns of grain and light that live within trees, shaping teak and mahoe and mahogany, his favourite, to his imagining will.<\/p>\n He carves her face. Square-tipped fingers reveal the pure line of chin and jaw, and etch the filigree of her ear. Tendrils of hair are used to polish the cheeks. Her face in the dusky room becomes a lamp, against whose shining his eyes close. Only the hand is alive.<\/p>\n Her eyes close too, lulled by his gentle burnishing. She pushes sleepily against his hand. Wood against the chisel, anxious to be shaped. Several large trees anchor the university campus nearby, relics of what, until quite recently, was farmland, with low walls separating the fields. Threading between the ancient trees like interrupted conversations are remnants of crumbling walls, some ruptured by the arrogant roots of the trees; the stones seem to be growing out of the earth too. The largest tree, in an out-of-the-way corner of the campus, has a single bench under its enormous spread of branches, as though it would allow no more than this single concrete intrusion on its dignity. At a respectful distance reside the jagged clumps of limestone and mortar. There the young woman likes to sit, on the bench or one of the fragments, to study or, more often, daydream. Young men find her there; sometimes they seem to have followed her. Irrationally (given the isolated spot and the reputed lawlessness of the nearby section of the city where the poor live) she is never afraid there. The tree is strong, and gentle in its light, embracing her with stillness. She would like to be a tree.<\/p>\n One young man, who shares a course with her, she invites to the tree. They sit and study and talk for hours. He lives nearby, and asks her home for lunch one day. No one is there; even before eating they go to his room. It becomes almost routine, though if someone is there they remain in the living room. The affair, tart and sweet as a green apple, barely outlasts the semester but by then she is almost a member of the family. She breezes in and out for a drink of water, or to fix herself food from the fridge.<\/p>\n Gramp, the grandfather of her friend who has moved on to another woman (whom she knows and likes) finds her here when he comes back from living abroad to die. The family is comfortable leaving him in her care when they need to. She, with no living grandparents and estranged from her father, soaks herself in his stories and wisdom.<\/p>\n Today, in this warm green room, she feels herself sculpted by the old man’s ardour. She feels as old and sheltering as the tree, polished and glowing. A source of shade and peace.<\/p>\n She turns slowly, slowly, and kneels before the old man, whose ragged breath gurgles through the tube, whose eyes are closed. She takes his hand and eases it beneath her shirt and covers her breast with it. She holds it there. His fingers tighten like a whisper and his eyes open. Seriously as children they look at each other. Her nipple is a seed. In his eyes a light flares like a match and she sees straight through his life to a blazing desire that she knows is not for her.<\/p>\n The flame dies, slowly, quenched by blue eyelids. The old man’s fingers soften, are still. She is aware of them suddenly as apart from her skin, cooler.<\/p>\n His mouth falls open.<\/p>\n Gramp?<\/em><\/p>\n She looks at him steadily, scarcely breathing herself. Hears nothing except the bubble and hiss of the oxygen. The sound is thunderous.<\/p>\n She touches him. Cautiously, as though she might startle him, she puts her other hand on his chest. Listens with her fingers.<\/p>\n After a long moment she reaches up. Closes his mouth. Removes his hand from her breast. Crosses them in his lap.<\/p>\n Then, careful not to disturb, she stands. Reaches over to the oxygen cylinder and turns it off. The sudden absence of that sound, which had defined time over many weeks, sucks all other sounds into a deep silence.<\/p>\n Carefully, efficiently, she removes the harness of tubes and straps from around his head, fluffing his untidy hair into a halo. She straightens the pyjama jacket, buttons up his pale skeletal chest with its discolouring blooms of flesh.<\/p>\n From the bedside table she picks up a slim comb of filigree silver. Goes to stand behind the tall chair.<\/p>\n Time to comb our hair, Gramp. Company coming.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":761,"parent":148,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-183","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/183\/revisions\/685"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nAn arm lifts from the chair and flutters in the air like a wing. She reaches for it. But it eludes her and falls back to rest. She comes around and squats on the floor again, and makes the hand into a sandwich with both of hers. Moves them this way and that as though they are playing a children’s game.<\/p>\n