Mortality
By
Her husband was dead now and she couldn’t stop
laughing. There he was on the couch,
cooling to her touch, the television still tuned to ESPN. His eyes were open and his mouth was slightly
ajar, revealing the line of crooked lower teeth, a piece of green vegetable
caught near the gum line.
She had found others dead before, her mother who just
never woke up one morning, a stranger floating in the lake behind her house, a
beloved cat curled stiffly in a corner.
And now she was anticipating others’ deaths, a friend with advanced lung
cancer, the boy with leukemia on the other side of the lake, the reckless
teenagers who she feared might wrap their cars around the telephone pole at the
bend in the road.
But this she never anticipated, which was why it was
so absurd. Just a little while ago, she
had heard him on the phone with his law partner discussing a case. She licked his neck, tasted the salt on his
skin. He was wearing his running shoes,
a T-shirt and shorts. She could imagine
him pounding the pavement, the sweat dripping from his hair, the iPod buds in
his ears. He would play Aerosmith and
the Rolling Stones while he ran, all those musicians so much older but so much
more alive than he was. She laughed at
this, too.
She laughed and laughed as she pulled out the
half-empty bottle of Gatorade that was held upright between his thighs. She took a swig and laughed some more. She embraced him roughly and held his head
between her hands. “
Copyright © 2005 Amy Kiger-