Dying Season

"It's the dying season," she said, flat as the line on the screen of the machine attached to a new corpse, when she saw me gawking at the number of sympathy flowers on the delivery table at the back of the shop. Hours later, my father on the phone, long distance, bearing news of barely escaping another act of population control; flirting with nurses while he waited for his catheterization. Tonight he tells me the doctors let him watch the whole thing on the television attached to the tube with the camera on it that crept precariously toward his rib cage like a game piece on a Snakes and Ladders board, where with one wrong move he could fall way down, and I can't help but wonder how it must have felt to see the body's slow decay from the outside in, adjusting the volume on the monitor like it's a documentary on NOVA that's been filmed so far away. Days and days, and he's been waiting. Waiting to be discharged, waiting to die. Days and days, and it's been raining all this time. It's been raining all this time and the spring foliage is radiant and breathing. No irony lost here. "It's the dying season," she said. It's the dying season, and tomorrow, while flight attendents shuttle my father through their airports in a wheelchair, I'll watch the river pulse urgent and high through this city like blood to the core just before the heart stops.