Fiction

The man and the woman looked out of the window together. They watched the rain dance on the glass then slide down in jagged little serpentines until it collected in shallow pools along the brick ledge outside.

His young wife rolled him in to the clinic room on a motorized wheelchair. Review of records indicated that he was here for a follow up after a prolonged hospitalization for cardiac arrest.

It was December and snow was falling on the parking lot. Big lights, to ward off carjackers and muggers, made the white ground twinkle. A line of snow-covered cars slumbered.

“There you are,” he says each morning. He seems amazed she is still there.

“Here I am,” she smiles back.

It was a blustery day in November. The wind whipped across the front steps of Avon Road as I made my way towards the front door of my house. I’d walked in chilled to the bone.

During the night, the wind picked up. By early morning, spume-covered waves churned the steely, grey sea. Near the island of Skopelos, the waves and the wind had gained enough strength to divert the ferry to the Agnontas port on the western side of the island, sheltered from the open Aegean, where the cove tended to be much calmer on such days.

Alice squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the passenger window when her father began singing. Rudy, who always sang as soon as he turned over the van, crooned a Sinatra tune, an old favorite from his Rat Pack repertoire. He sang in the car the way other fathers sang in the shower.

On a sunny morning in June, Marge found an empty seat on a bus in Arusha, Tanzania. This bus contained several other middle-age white males and females, all from the United States. Marge, a retired botany professor now traveler, propelled her body into a window seat on the left side, where she landed with a thump.

2014 was a bad year for birding. An avian virus infected and sickened birds. Hundreds collapsed and fell from tree branches as if they’d been shot by what Dr. Albright refused to call “sportsmen.” 

“I can clean the house, right?” It was Chuck’s self-imposed, allotted day to clean his apartment, now that he and his longtime cleaning lady had mutually agreed it was too risky for her to work during the shutdown. He paid her anyway. 

To my dismay, I found I had high blood pressure shortly after I retired as an elementary school principal at the age of sixty-three.

A sharp pitch pulled me from my sleep. I sat erect and turned to the small crib nestled beneath the window beside me.

Grace noticed the girl’s fingers first, stubby with chewed nails that looked sore.

I often wonder about what happened to old friends or acquaintances. What was their story?

I am eating almonds. These days, I can’t seem to get enough of them. Something about the bland crunch of them pulls me in. Biting into an almond is like snapping a twig. It is firm until it is not anymore, solid and then suddenly broken.

Coach said “no excuses.” And what was he going to say anyway when no one wants to hear the word “cancer”?

Ikenna stared longingly at his wife. It has been what now? Eight months. Not even a touch. He kicked his feet aimlessly in a failed attempt to release the tension welling between his legs.

Darrell leaves on a late spring bicycle vacation in Hawaii. Maddie angrily, reluctantly, stays behind.

“Spare me some change, would you?” a homeless lady calls from the street corner. Her thick Southern accent shows me that she has come a long way from home.

It was almost time to go home after a busy clinic day seeing patients with a wide variety of heart diseases. I looked at my schedule – there was one more patient, a woman.

It was the first day of clinical in my Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Time to actually bring real patients into the picture! We were visiting a local nursing home to work on our communication skills. Each student was assigned a nursing home resident. We were to spend the day with the patient, interacting, laughing, and assisting them with their daily activities. This was a time for making memories!

Before COVID-19, I had a daily routine: Leave for the hospital at 7:00 AM, return home at 9:00 PM or later. Days were filled with treating cancer patients, writing academic papers and proposing projects. Evenings were filled with meetings, potlucks, restaurants, and workouts at the gym.

His daughter had insisted he get a room with a view. The manager had promised her to find her father the best views of the whole complex.

He wanted to be scooped up in the ocean wave of new discoveries and to ride the wave for as long as he could. Anything, anything to have a chance.