An old woman sits on her old chair. Her cold, white, hanging skin rests on the equally cold wooden armrest of the old chair. The chair is a green of a passed decade, but is the softest place in the house, save the bed. The darker green carpeting also gives softly under her towel-soft slippers. Inside the slippers, her pale toes are curled from the excitement. The walls are brown and close to each other, but this does not affect her. Her face is waiting, made most obvious in her eyes as they surpass the television before her, and stare into the world of happening, rather than waiting. Her hair is thin and white as cotton. It is put up into curls, greatly contrasting with the straight horizontal lines that are wrinkled into her face. Before her is a coffee table, speckled with clear dots. On the table is a handwritten letter. The words seem scrawled quickly, and stretch across the page hurriedly. The old woman does not look directly at the letter, but beyond it. The letters words and images still burn in her mind, and in her fingertips and knuckles. She slowly leans over and addresses the top of the letter “Dear Doris,” and sits back into her padded chair. The chair creaked loudly when she first sat up, and whispered its opposite on the way back. Her husband sits next to her quietly. He is an old thin man, with sunken cheeks and sun-wrinkles like sideways eyelashes. He is on a similar chair, but holds his towel wrapped hand in his other hand. His face contains the waiting of his wife, but an added bit of pain. If you were to go to the place where both the old man and woman’s eyes met, all the trouble would be over. Their eyes are staring at the exact place where the hospital is. This is where his hand is healed, and where only scars have to remember. His hand waits with them.
The letter reads as so:
“Dear Doris:
If today were Tuesday then he would be asleep by now. He would come home early, without eating his supper, and sometimes without saying goodnight, and drag his tired body up the wooden stairway. But today is not Tuesday, today is Monday, and he has treated today as if it were the next. Today he came home, went right through the front door and went straight up the stairs. Mind you, he even left the front door wide open. As I watched him ascend I noticed that it seemed as if his thighs were pulling up his legs, and his legs dangled under, landing luckily on the steps each time. Then it seemed to me that his thighs were merely being pulled by his hips, and so on, until it seemed his whole body was moved by something else. Whatever was moving him, he was being moved.
Remember last summer when you visited and saw our delightful home, and complimented on the wood handrail? Your husband, Alfred, made the jest about it being made from an old grandfather clock, since it looked so very complex for just a handrail. Over the years, it has been the thing to fall apart the most. Our grandchildren love to pull pieces from it, no matter how much their parents scold. We laughed then and would laugh today, if it were not for Jonathan’s hand.
As he were being moved, as it were, up the stairway, his hand dragged upon the old rail, as he always does. However, there was a very large chunk of wood towards the top, and it lodged into his hand. Right between his thumb and index finger. It looked as if our dear Jonathan had grown another finger! You could see this (we will refer to it as a “splinter”, but hardly a kind tweezers or a needle could remove), splinter from across the room, where I sat. When I first noticed the splinter I thought perhaps he had cut his finger at the factory, since it was a lot more watery than his other fingers. I walked up the stairs after him, only to see him lying in bed, with the plank still protruding his hand. I slowly crept along the carpeting, which was not difficult with our soft carpet, and made my way to his side of the bed. I was not careful to wake him, since I knew he would not wake up. I had to step over his jumpsuit to reach him, which reminded me of a melted man. I would have thought this an odd thing to think, but given the circumstances, there were odder things to worry about. I knelt next to the bed and reached out towards the punctured hand. I slowly placed my fingers around the wood from the handrail, and pulled it quickly out. A small mouth had developed on his hand, and closed its lips in pain when I pulled the plank out. A second later his hand seemed to develop consumption, as the mouth were coughing up water now. It flowed out as if it were what his entire body was made of. It filled his mattress, and covered his shirt. The waterfall was constant, and I looked at my husbands face. It was paling even more with each handful of water. I looked down at the wood in my hand. It reminded me of a newly pulled tooth, and with all mine, and my 4 children, I know I’ve seen my share. I watched his face cave in on itself. Seeing that the coloring of his face now similar to the bones showing through, I decided to put the plank back in. As I held the plank similar to how I hold the pencil now, I realized you can see his ribs through his chest, and decided to hurry and not give myself time to realize anything else. I pushed the plank into the mouth, as if I were a forcing food down a child’s mouth. I twisted the plank, and pushed it further in, not knowing at what point to stop. I feared that pushing it in too far would cause more damage, and feared that pushing it not far enough would allow the water to leak through the sides. I gave it one more nudge, and my husband’s eyes shot open. He quickly sat up, looked at the plank in his hand, then looked at me with my fingers on it, and then back at the plank, and then said ‘ouch!’
I am only writing to tell you this Doris, because you deserve to know. Please pardon the wet spots on this page, for Jonathan had clumsily let his hand drip onto the page. I am also telling you this because I am unable to pay you back the money I owe you, due to the costly hospital bills we are surely to pay.
Sincerely,
Martha H. Hatherson”
The old man fiddles with his wrapping impatiently. His wife turns her head over towards him sharply, and he stops. In the distance both of them hear an ambulance that is always approaching, but the ambulance cannot be heard by anyone else. Just then Martha, the old woman closes her eyes, and sighs to herself. She hums to herself a song that her mother used to sing to her, and that she sung to her children. In her old age she has forgotten the words, but remembers the melody as if it were what she always is sighing. They do not even hear the ambulance when it arrives, as they have heard it since her husband awoke.
