by Claudia Monpere
3:00 am and you need to pee but can’t free yourself from the sheets and blankets your legs move but you can’t figure out how to untangle yourself you’re a fish in a trawl net you’re a mummy in linen bandages and someone is wailing and you wish they’d shut up and your husband turns on the light asking you to calm down please calm down and you realize you’re the one wailing and your husband’s thick hands tenderly untangle you and he guides you to the bathroom and the next morning you drink coffee and laugh about it with the receptionist on the phone who says doctor can’t see you until next week and you agree it was probably a night terror rare in adults but not unheard of and your husband’s in the background shaking his head no, no–you must be seen today tomorrow at the latest– but you confirm the appointment in a week before he can grab your phone and hang up grateful for the strong coffee and your sunny kitchen and you will ruminate on this moment in your remaining 3.2 years which you understand is far longer than the median survival of glioblastoma patients yet you want to howl when people say what a gift it is you want to gift them with malaria smallpox bubonic plague and you disgust yourself with this reaction which you confess to your two closest friends who’ve taken you to the Russian River & who say you’re fucking right and come on–now it’s time to swim and they help you put on your bathing suit and guide you to the river shore help you into an inner tube and there you are the three of you drifting in the river and the loud gigantic family in the cabins near yours, the family with their barbeque family reunion smells and water melon eating contests steers toward you in their blow-up stadium islander eleven of them crammed inside a beer in each hand and the oldest woman leans out and gifts your friends and you with beers but yours she opens and you feel her wet fingers handing you the beer the sun warming your shoulders dappling the river and you wiggle your toes in the water and take a huge icy gulp and you invite the day to bless you.
Claudia Monpere writes and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction and creative nonfiction appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Split Lip, The Forge, Craft, Atlas and Alice, Milk Candy Review, Trampset, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals asThe Cincinnati Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, and Hunger Mountain. She received the 2023 SmokeLong Workshop Prize and will appear in Best Small Fictions 2024.
Emerge Literary Journal 