by Andy Young
We got a hotel as close as possible to the hospital, my brother, daughter and I, parked the white rental car near all the other white rental cars. Each one seemed a sheet under which a loved one lay. Ours was in the Neuro ward.
Through the swoosh doors, down the bright halls like the plastic containers in pneumatic bank tubes. Lit-up numbers, three floors to float up. Though she wore the flimsy green of the sick, my mom had fixed her hair and put on makeup. She made a great show of not being afraid or even gloomy about the fact that her skull would be opened.
The three of us hovered, took turns with the stiff recliner and its buttons. Tried to crack jokes, make small talk, though all talk had become very small all at once.
A voice through the wall yelled scraps of the alphabet in short bursts: A A A B B C C C.
Father Juan suddenly filled the doorway. He wore his casual priest gear: short-sleeves, white collar against his nutmeg skin. In one hand the Bible, in the other a jar of anointing oil. Holy shit (forgive me Father) was that the oil for Last Rights? Or is it the Anointing of the Sick? Extreme Unction? Action? Conjunction junction what’s your function function function the priest said prayers now: his lips moved, his mouth shaped words; he signed the cross, parting the air above my mother.
Then he pulled out a little box of wafers the Body of Christ and my mom opened her mouth like I used to when she let me lick the spoon. When he lifted the host toward us, my brother and I barely shook our heads. We didn’t want mom to worry about the fact that we were heathens. Or that her grandchild would be.
Father Juan dipped his thumb into the chrism, rubbed it onto the center of her forehead. When he turned to leave, mom stopped him, asked him to face the wall to her left—she pointed—and pray toward the voice, a man who had had a motorcycle accident. No one visits him, she says, he just says letters all day. Father Juan turned toward the voice and made the sign of the cross, lifted his face to the ceiling and asked for mercy. We joined him in the Hail Mary, the alphabet, in fits and starts, punctuating the blessed are you and now and at the hour of our death.
We said goodbye rest easy we’ll be back before dawn to see you before you “go in.” None of us knew if that time tomorrow she would be the same woman, the one who watched us leave with those enormous brown eyes.
Supper. Stripmall Mexican. Shots of tequila that made us wince. Wincing was what we nee-EE-ded. In the beige hotel room, we toe-toe-toe-toasted our m-mother, played UNO O O O O until we slept.
Andy Young‘s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was just released with Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared in Identity Theory, Drunken Boat, and Michigan Quarterly Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and in jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. andyyoung.org, @andyyoungpoet
Emerge Literary Journal 