THE VENT | Mariana Mcdonald
If I told you how it happened you’d say I made it up. But it’s true. It’s how I got here.
The vent above my bed was loose. The air vent. I hadn’t really noticed. You know how it is with ceiling problems. You don’t see them. Not unless you’re lying down when you’re awake and lights are on and…well, you know.
Like the time I was sitting at the breakfast table and felt a strange sensation of wet on my brow. The way my mind works, I ignored it for a while, but when it went from wet to wetter, I assumed I had some strange kind of brain tumor that makes everything go damp. I finally heard a plink!, looked up, and saw drips coming from a leak in my ceiling.
But about the vent. In my bedroom. The vent had dropped an inch on one side where a screw tore through the sheetrock. Bits of sheetrock snow on my bed. I have no idea how it happened. I don’t know if it was from cars or slammed doors or just gravity.
Handy as I like to think I am, I set to fix it. I didn’t pay attention to the fact that there was little there to hold it. Just jammed it back up, tweaked the screw, and that was that.
I forgot all about it until the night it happened. I was somewhere in between the sleep that gets you ready for deep sleep and the deep sleep where you dream about things so silly or so profound you can’t remember them.
I do recall a noise. A kind of thump. Or maybe I made that up when the vent fell on my head and took out a chunk of my scalp.
If you know anything about scalps—I mean, most people do know something—you know they bleed like crazy. My scalp was no exception.
I cried out as the pain clobbered me. I grabbed my head and felt a thick gush of blood like an oil spill. My mind began to react, which is to say I panicked. I reached for my phone and pushed the emergency number, then turned on the lamp. In the light I saw my blood all over the pillow and sheets.
They say I must’ve lost consciousness then, because they found me looking like a CSI scene. They hauled me off to the hospital to get me stabilized.
That’s where the troubles really started. Not that I remember it. My daughter came and talked to me once they had me in ICU, plugged into a bunch of wires and machines like a motherboard.
Or so she said. She’s an LPN, so she knows stuff, and found it somehow comforting to review out loud each and every step they were taking.
But it scared the dickens out of me, hearing all the things they did or were going to do to me. I couldn’t ask her to be quiet, because I was unconscious, or at least I couldn’t get my brain and mouth to cooperate. And anyway, it seemed to calm her. Like you see in the movies when someone is in a coma, and they always say talk to the coma person, they will hear it, they will know you are there. Who was I to begrudge her that?
So I sat through the recitation of my lousy health report card.
“You’ve got really high blood pressure, Dad, did you know?” she said. “But they’ve got it down for now. And your liver, it’s enlarged. You’ve got some type of hepatitis.”
Do you have to rub it in? I wanted to say. I know I haven’t been the best of patients. So busy. Taking care of the family and the house and working…
It’s hard to make time.
I guess I let the pounds come on, lots of them, when I quit smoking three years ago. And I started drinking more. Traded one vice for another.
My doctor said I need to exercise and lose some weight. She put me on pills for my blood pressure. But they make me feel funny so I don’t always take them.
Every time I went in to the clinic, they started asking the exercise question, no matter what I was there for. Got the flu, feverish and coughing, and there they are quizzing me about exercise. Talk about bad timing.
It got so I would tell them what I thought they wanted to hear just to get them off my back. Said I took a walk every day, hardly ever drank, ate a lot of vegetables. All lies, or fibs, depending how you see it. And they believed every word of it.
But I’m being straight with you right now, I am.
You see, I thought the whole thing through.
I didn’t want to end up like my cousin. He was working at the grinder and he had some kind of stroke, fell into the grinder and lost a hand. Which he wasn’t going to need anymore, because the stroke did him in.
The funeral home had to pull out all the stops to get him viewing-ready, and they did a great job. It set his family back a bundle, though, right when they were down to just one paycheck.
So I thought, not for me! Let me go without the fanfare when I go. Don’t put me in some expensive box so I can dance with worms.
Then I thought about you all. How you’re always trying to help, even if we don’t listen. You go through all that school and all those years of training, because you want to help.
So I thought, what the heck—make myself useful. And maybe make up for the fibbing.
I got all the papers and signed all the forms.
So here you go. It’s a gift.
I hope you learn a lot from my cadaver.
Mariana Mcdonald (she, her, they) is a poet, writer, public health scientist, and activist. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Ceasefire Now!, Sargasso, Antología de la Poesía Viequense, About Place Journal, and Anthology of Southern Poets: Georgia. She co-authored Dominga Rescues the Flag about Puerto Rican heroine Dominga de la Cruz. She was named a Black Earth Institute Scholar/Fellow in 2022. She lives in Atlanta.