EXIT; STAGE 4 | Joan Hill

I should tell you about the middle-of-night calls
before I forget
since horror recedes like a scab wound
after it’s worn you
and you rush back to your life
horror behind you, you think.

Who knows
maybe next time it will be me or you
on speakerphone in a hospital room
doctors bedside soliciting the legal yes
having already decided to cut; to explore.

They have to, they say when I ask what if we don’t cut M
and they tell me there could be hell to pay—
he could die.

So out they pull M’s guts
to examine them; find nothing
but leave a footlong zipper of staples
across M’s belly and M is flattened.

The second call, some few nights later:
trouble beneath M’s staples same as before
and he could die.

This time they make small cuts between M’s staples and
he excruciates in the gastro-surgical ICU,
tube taped to his nose and plunged to his core
even though he is stage 4 since February
and belongs on his last vacation.

The third call, M out of his mind.
He pleads for me to come right now, his yells terrified
over the doctor-salesman’s rich radio voice.
The term is delirious and by the time I arrive,
slowed by special escort into the nightside hospital,
M is asleep; drugged.

It isn’t until I beg,
drop tears on linoleum outside M’s room
and the word fuck that the
palliative nurse begins to take me seriously.
I am M’s rescuer; I am a ghoul
for mentioning giving up and
to stop trying to save M.

When he dies first week of June
everyone says he never
should have had surgery and
who did those doctors think they were.

I remember M on his porch in April
thin with his cane; he knew he was dying
showing me how he pressed his back
against his home’s cold bricks to ease the pain
telling me about the crows that came
when he cawed to them, but he didn’t call them then
and I pictured their blackness and
wondered what he fed them.
Or was it just his call that was enough.

Joan Hill is a freelance writer with a background in financial planning. Her short fiction has appeared in Fogged Clarity, Prick of the Spindle, and the Penman Review.