All You Know is Guilt
By Kellyann Ye
You know she’s going to die before you see her in the operating room. The doctors said as much that day after, with their voices blank as the whitewashed walls and scalpels lined up in glinting rows. Two months, and she’ll be gone. All we can do is give her a few more weeks.
It’s March, you count. Two months makes May. Two months and she’ll be gone. But really she has barely three weeks.
Right now, watching her laugh and toss her hair back when you pass her your coat to put on over her hospital gown, thanking you for your chivalry when you push her wheelchair to the car, you can hardly believe it.
But you will.
You know you will.
The fourteenth of April you wake up with cold feet, walk coatless outside past the dying geraniums into the chill and ice of almost-spring. You stay outside until your fingers shake and your lips go numb and it feels a little bit like penance. Penance for knowing and never doing. Never, ever doing.
You take the next day off work, call in when you wake up and cough a few times for show, take a train into the city, and spend the whole ride wondering how long you can escape this.
She won’t be the only one that dies. You can plot the deaths on your Calendar app, three a month, regular as clockwork – and God, you hate that phrase, hate it like nothing else.
And the sucker is, you watch it happen anyway, behind your squeezed-shut eyelids with the bitter taste of the last sip of coffee still staining your mouth, watch it play out breath-by-breath just like you did in the dream - you spend the whole morning unable to tear your eyes from the clock behind the counter.
So you see it happen, four hundred miles and three feet away, see the clock tick past 7:13 to 7:14, watch the unyielding drag of the second hand until it pulls the minute hand to 7:27, and you know she’s gone.
You walk the long way home from the train station on purpose, to avoid the hanging crowd of rubbernecks and horrified citizens two streets over where a young woman’s corpse is no longer stretched out across both lanes of the skidmark-streaked road.
The night is exceptionally clear, and the stars shine down on the lonely alleyways like a sky full of frozen tears. The cold still feels like penance, but the guilt is too thick to bear.
By Kellyann Ye
You know she’s going to die before you see her in the operating room. The doctors said as much that day after, with their voices blank as the whitewashed walls and scalpels lined up in glinting rows. Two months, and she’ll be gone. All we can do is give her a few more weeks.
It’s March, you count. Two months makes May. Two months and she’ll be gone. But really she has barely three weeks.
Right now, watching her laugh and toss her hair back when you pass her your coat to put on over her hospital gown, thanking you for your chivalry when you push her wheelchair to the car, you can hardly believe it.
But you will.
You know you will.
The fourteenth of April you wake up with cold feet, walk coatless outside past the dying geraniums into the chill and ice of almost-spring. You stay outside until your fingers shake and your lips go numb and it feels a little bit like penance. Penance for knowing and never doing. Never, ever doing.
You take the next day off work, call in when you wake up and cough a few times for show, take a train into the city, and spend the whole ride wondering how long you can escape this.
She won’t be the only one that dies. You can plot the deaths on your Calendar app, three a month, regular as clockwork – and God, you hate that phrase, hate it like nothing else.
And the sucker is, you watch it happen anyway, behind your squeezed-shut eyelids with the bitter taste of the last sip of coffee still staining your mouth, watch it play out breath-by-breath just like you did in the dream - you spend the whole morning unable to tear your eyes from the clock behind the counter.
So you see it happen, four hundred miles and three feet away, see the clock tick past 7:13 to 7:14, watch the unyielding drag of the second hand until it pulls the minute hand to 7:27, and you know she’s gone.
You walk the long way home from the train station on purpose, to avoid the hanging crowd of rubbernecks and horrified citizens two streets over where a young woman’s corpse is no longer stretched out across both lanes of the skidmark-streaked road.
The night is exceptionally clear, and the stars shine down on the lonely alleyways like a sky full of frozen tears. The cold still feels like penance, but the guilt is too thick to bear.