By Richie Zaborowske
Featured Art: “Frills” by Alex Brice
Afraid that her husband Clint would find out, Debra began withdrawing cash out of their savings account and hiding the money in a wool sock in her underwear drawer. She got herself a divorce lawyer, a good one from one of those law firms with three last names. After searching around online, she found a landlord who, after she placed two months’ rent down as a deposit, didn’t ask too many questions. Then, when she finally had everything in place, when the only thing left was for her to find the courage to tell Clint she was leaving, on his way home from happy hour at Smitty’s Tap, Clint blew a stop sign and rammed his Ford F-150 into the side of a milk truck.
A police officer told her about the accident. Knocking on her door as Debra was dumping a pot of spaghetti noodles into a colander in the kitchen sink. Clint had never been to jail. But he was no stranger to law enforcement. So, she wasn’t exactly surprised when she opened the door and a police officer was standing on her porch.
“Your husband’s been in a wreck,” the officer said, in one breath, as if he had been running. The officer was young; cropped haircut, big ears. Haltingly, he explained that Clint was in a coma. Showed her a picture of the scene on his phone; the side of Clint’s truck crumpled like tinfoil; a blast of glass strewn across the road.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” the officer said. His squad car was parked behind him on the curb. The flashers were spinning around, and the elm tree in her yard, bare branches reaching out into the cold November night, flashed red then blue, red then blue. Debra lived in a duplex, her tenants next door, an Indian family, were likely wondering why a squad car was parked in their street. And her neighbors, the nosy ones in the bungalow across the street, were probably peeking behind their curtains, already on that neighborhood gossip app, having a field day messaging each other.
“They brought him to St. Luke’s,” the officer added.
“I should go there,” Debra said reflexively, although she was already thinking that she wouldn’t go. She wasn’t religious, didn’t necessarily believe in God, but she did believe in signs. That a person needed to be receptive to the patterns of the world. Before they married, there must have been signs that Clint was a terrible, spiteful man. But she had missed the signs, or maybe ignored them, she wasn’t sure. But she knew this was a sign to leave Clint, that her jail cell had been left unlocked, and it was time for her to escape.
After the officer left, Debra pulled her luggage from the closet and opened it on their bed. There was still a price tag dangling off the handle, and even though she had owned the luggage for many years, the luggage still had a new plastic smell. Before they were married, Clint had promised to take her to Hawaii. They were going to see the humpback whales off the island of Oahu. Clint had said he wanted to try surfing.
“You?” she had asked. Clint wore blue Levi’s jeans and saddle-brown cowboy boots every day of the year. When he swam, he thrashed about the water as if he were getting attacked. She tried to imagine him with a colorful Hawaiian shirt half-unbuttoned, canary yellow shorts down to his knees; hands outstretched as he tried balancing on a surfboard. She laughed at the image.
“There’s a lot about me that may surprise you,” he had said, winking underneath the camo Ford hat he always wore.
Of course, he never took her to Hawaii, she thought, tossing a pair of slacks into her luggage. He never took her anywhere. His idea of a vacation was going out with the guys, “just for a few drinks,” then disappearing on a bender. Days later, showing up hungover. Wearing the same clothes he had on when he left, reeking like a bartender’s mop bucket. Early in their marriage, he would apologize. Fall to his knees and cry. Beg her to forgive him. But as the years passed his apologizing turned to blaming. He’d say it was her fault. It was her nagging about the dishes or the vacuuming or giving him a hard time about going out that caused him to go out and drink.
At least when he was on a bender, he was gone and she didn’t have to deal with him, Debra thought, wrapping the cord around her hair dryer and stuffing it in her luggage. As an electrician, Clint worked long hours, often outside, and he’d come home tired. He’d stomp through the door, tracking mud across the linoleum kitchen flooring, before plopping down in his leather recliner where he spent most evenings. While Gunsmoke or Kung Fu played, he’d sit there, sullen, not saying much except occasionally complaining about his foreman who “never got off his ass.” The one-bedroom duplex was cramped, so Debra tried to make herself invisible. Silently reading a book in the kitchen, moving noiselessly when she opened the cupboard to make tea. Or she’d hangout in their bedroom. Looking up apartments on her phone while sitting in bed.
Before leaving the duplex, Debra took one last look around. She unplugged a wax warmer. Dumped the spaghetti noodles in the trash. Clint hated waste. He worked too damn hard for his money he’d tell her whenever she wanted to purchase something he found frivolous. Like last week when her co-worker’s daughter was selling Girl Scout cookies.
“We should buy some Thin Mints,” she had told Clint.
“We don’t need any cookies,” he had said, bent over, digging around in the fridge for a beer.
“It might be nice to buy a box or two,” Debra said. “There’s a sign up sheet in the break room.”
Clint popped up and smacked her; a quick, backhand that caught her on the chin. “We don’t need any damn cookies,” he had told her, stomping past her into the living room.
Flipping off the lights in the entryway, she grabbed her luggage and slammed the door. She told herself she would have to deal with any of that anymore.
Debra rolled her luggage into the garage. Her Subaru is parked next to Clint’s ‘67 Ford Ranger. There’s two clear garbage bags full of red and corn colored Miller High Life cans. On his workbench, a bottle of Old Grandad Whisky stands half-empty with its bottle cap off. Clint’s been working on the Ranger since they’ve been married. Almost twenty years now. The truck was still missing all the windows, a hood, and two tires. It looked no closer to being road ready than when he began the project.
Driving across the city, Debra felt buoyant, as if a weight had been lifted. She felt a thrill, something akin to being young, the freedom of driving alone for the first time after you get your driver’s license. Traffic was light and she hit green light after green light. She turned on the radio and flipped through the stations until she found a pop song from when she was in high school. It wasn’t a favorite of hers or even a song she liked, but she knew all the words and she cranked up the sound, belting out the lyrics while pounding the center console with her hand.
Pulling into the apartment parking lot, a thought began to pester her. What if Clint recovered? What if he woke quickly from his coma and he was unharmed? Was she negligent by not visiting him? Was it suspicious that she didn’t go to the hospital? She imagined a judge, shiny round head, bulbous pore covered nose, black robes, up on his bench, looking down. Admonishing her sternly. Asking her why she didn’t visit her husband while he suffered in the hospital? Asking her how she could divorce someone in her husband’s condition? Didn’t she have any sympathy?
Parking her Subaru, Debra sighed. She looked up at the apartment complex; each unit had a balcony with a sliding glass door. Through the slats of the vertical blinds she could see a television playing in one unit, three children, one of them in a high chair, chubby legs swinging, sitting around a table in another. People were having normal, calm nights. While she was out here. It was surreal, really. Not how she had expected her life to turn out.
Debra put her vehicle in reverse, backed up. She would visit him, then she’d leave, she told herself over and over. Driving slowly back across town, heading toward St. Luke’s with the radio turned all the way down.
***
The next morning, Clint had a bandage the size of a wasp’s nest over his forehead. A nasal cannula ran from his nose and across his cheek which was red and purple and looked like a raw steak. Standing next to his bed, Debra thought she saw him move, his neck muscles straining as if he were trying to get up. She almost pushed the nurse’s button, reaching out her arm, but then Clint stopped moving.
Debra’s mind was fogged after a night spent on the pullout couch in the corner of the hospital room. She had slept horribly. Clint spent most nights zonked out on his recliner. Being in the same room as him, even if he was in a coma, was unnerving. And now, standing next to Clint’s bed, wondering if she had imagined him moving, she felt as if she were suffocating. She wanted to leave. Felt an urge, an almost primal instinct, to push through the doorway, sprint down the hallway, and escape.
Clint moved again, his leg lifting slightly before falling. He moaned and opened his eyes. Squinting, blinking, he looked around the room. Half the room was dark, the other half illuminated with harsh LED light. An ECG monitor near the bed emitted a series of beeps. He followed the noise, looking up and up, until his eyes met Debra’s, and he smiled.
Debra reared back and mashed the nurses’ button.
***
Later that day, with one hand on Debra’s shoulder, a nurse would tell her Clint’s recovery was a miracle. A doctor would tell her it was TBI; traumatic brain injury. Clint has a long road of recovery before him, the doctor told her, he may suffer bouts of confusion, difficulty with balance, personality changes.
The doctor continued while Debra half-listened. On the bed, Clint was awake, but he looked like a nightmare. His eyes, empty and hollow, stared up at the ceiling. His face was red and looked dry and shriveled like a forgotten front-porch jack-o’-lantern.
As the doctor’s words, contusion, bilateral, spasticity, pelted her like hail, Debra stood there. Clint was in pain. She should have cared but didn’t. She tried to find in her heart sympathy for him but after searching found none.
***
That day Clint was in and out of sleep while Debra made laps from the cafeteria for coffee, back to the room. She felt jittery and exhausted. Promised herself she’d never spend the night at the hospital again. Before she left for the night, Debra watched the blue hospital blanket over Clint rising and falling as he breathed. If she listened closely she could hear from his chest a faint, papery rattle. It sounded like wind whipping against a windowpane, or maybe someone whispering. Maybe it was Death making a promise to her, she thought. She hoped.
***
In the days after, days filled with MRIs, and neurologists, and heated phone conversations with the insurance company, Debra kept promising herself she’d stop visiting. But Clint’s parents were no longer alive, he had no siblings, no close friends. And whenever Debra tried to muster the courage to leave, she’d envision the judge looking down at her, raising his gavel as he regarded her as if she were a dog who had just shit the carpeting.
So, she stayed. Applied for FMLA leave at North Star Dental where she worked as a dental hygienist. She spent her days at the hospital, talking to doctors, or staring at the television. Clint mostly rested, laying there, lost somewhere between being asleep and being awake. In the past, if she watched television around him, he would always make snide comments on whichever shows she chose; HGTV was nothing but an ad for Home Depot, CNN was for Democrats. But now he couldn’t say anything at all.
Debra spent her evenings at home. The duplex felt larger now, empty. No longer wanting to use their bedroom, she slept on the couch. She wrapped herself in a sleeping bag from the garage. She’d sit there for hours, laptop propped on her legs. She’d watch Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. She’d randomly read Wikipedia entries. She was coasting, she realized. Purposely not thinking, filling her time mindlessly so she wouldn’t have to contemplate the decision she’d eventually have to make.
***
The first time Clint spoke, his voice graveled over with phlegm, to her astonishment, he thanked Debra.
“I appreciate you being here,” he told her as she passed him the plastic hospital water bottle. She’d pretend she didn’t hear him. He took a sip from the straw, grimacing in pain as he swallowed.
“Thank you,” he told her when he was finished.
***
He began talking more. They’d have conversations; halting, and awkward, but still, conversations. To her surprise, he’d ask her questions. How was her day? How was she feeling? Did she like her coffee?
One evening, just as the sun was setting, Clint asked her to stay the night. They were in the room alone. His heart monitor beeping, muffled chatter murmuring underneath the doorway. There was something in his voice, a softness, that made her think of the first time she had met Clint. She was still in college, at home on winter break. Her and her cousin, Rebecca, were at the Port Plaza Mall. The two of them were waiting for a slice of Sbarro’s pizza in the food court when Rebecca waved a boy over. He carried an Orange Julius in one hand, his Ford truck hat pulled low so Debra could barely make out the wisp of mustache above his lip.
“Does your shirt mean you’re a jock or something?” she had asked him later. Rebecca had wandered off to use the bathroom. Her and Clint were passing the water fountain in the middle of the mall. On the bottom of the fountain, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies shimmered like gold. The air was misted and smelled like chlorine. Clint wore cowboy boots, bootcut Levi’s, and one of those No Fear shirts. That day in the mall his No Fear shirt said, If you can’t win, don’t play.
“I’m not a jock. Not unless you count riding dirt bikes,” Clint said.
Clint was thin but had the muscled forearms of a farm boy who spent his summers bailing hay. Behind his right ear, a scar, white as a line of chalk on his tanned skin, ran down his neck, disappearing into his shirt. He had told Debra he had got it diving through a barbed-wire fence.
“Lucky, I didn’t bleed out,” he had said.
The boys at Debra’s college seemed to be either frat guys who spent their time drinking cheap beer while hunched over their Nintendo consoles, or boys who spent their time stoned and playing frisbee in the quad as if they were in the lot at a Grateful Dead concert. Clint was different, serious. Already working as an electrician’s apprentice. Eyeing up buying a duplex, he had told her. He’d live on one side, and he’d rent out to tenants on the other. They’d cover his mortgage and then some.
“What if the toilet springs a leak at three in the morning and your tenants call you?” Debra asked him.
“Then I’ll fix it,” Clint told her.
Debra found his confidence, the fact that he could repair things with his hands, exhilarating. She even liked the way his cowboy boots clacked across the mall flooring. When he asked her to dinner, said he’d take her to Olive Garden, she told him, Yes.
At the hospital, flakes of snow, the first of winter, fell past the window. It was nearly dark, but Debra could see them touch upon the black asphalt in the parking lot and, as if they were drifting into a chasm, vanish.
“This place makes me nervous,” Clint said. “Not that I’m afraid of the dark,” he said, coughing out a phlegmy laugh.
There was a knock on the door, then a nurse hurried inside carrying a tray full of shiny instruments and gauze.
“How’s everyone this evening?” she asked cheerfully.
“Have a good night, Clint.” Debra said, nodding toward the nurse, brushing past her, and making her way briskly down the hallway.
***
They moved him twice. Rolling his bed to another part of the hospital. Each time, further away from the chaos and clammer of the ER. The room he had now was quiet. With its couch, framed watercolors, and, outside the window, a view of the interstate, the room reminded her of Hilton or Best Western. Everything was beige or brown or blue. They could decorate; the doctor told them. Some people brought in photographs, lamps, and even Christmas trees.
“Not that we expect Clint to stay that long,” the doctor said, looking up from his tablet, and winking at Clint.
“Depends,” Clint said, his voice straining, “what you’re going to get me for Christmas.”
The doctor laughed. Shook his head. “This one’s a real pistol.”
Besides kidding around, Clint began telling jokes. The first time he told one Debra thought he was having some sort of mental episode. He was lying on the hospital bed, propped up on his elbow. “Why shouldn’t you tell secrets in a cornfield?” he had said, wincing in pain.
“Do you think we’re in a cornfield?” she asked. She considered pushing the nurse’s button. Maybe Clint was having an aneurysm? Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the crash?
“Because there’s too many ears,” he said.
“What?”
“You know, ears. Like ears of corn,” he said, laughing.
When the nurses were doing their rounds, monitoring his blood pressure, he’d ask, “Why did the bicycle fall over?”
The nurse would finish jotting down a note. “Why?” she’d ask, her smile already forming.
“Because it was two tired,” Clint would say, winking at Debra.
“Time flies like an arrow,” Clint would tell the custodian as he emptied out the little trash canister in the room. “And fruit flies like a banana.”
Debra had never heard Clint crack a joke in his life and now here he was, telling jokes as if he were some sort of comedian. Debra couldn’t help but laugh, but she also felt unnerved, as if Clint were somehow undermining her or maybe, somehow, betraying her.
***
Just past the visitor parking lot where Debra parked her Outback was a retaining pond. The outer rim was edged over with ice, dried cattails poking through, the stalks trembling in the wind. The middle of the pond was still open. Ducks floated upon the dark water. Their mute brown bodies huddled. Their green heads, beaks pointing to their tails, nestled against their wings.
Whenever Debra visited St. Luke’s, she’d sit in her vehicle before going in and watch the ducks. Debra knew that not all ducks migrated. If they have a reason, enough food and water, they stay. Brave the Wisconsin winter instead of flying south. But even if they have feathers and secrete an oil, or whatever it was that kept them warm, they still looked miserable, she thought climbing into her vehicle and turning on the heat.
***
One night on Wikipedia Debra stumbled upon an article about Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman. In 1848, an explosion launched a thirteen-pound hammer through the air and it bulleted through his head. The hammer landed a few cart lengths down the tracks with a thud. Gage, although he now had a tunnel the size of fist in his head, was relatively unharmed. He could still walk and even had a conversation with the doctor who bandaged him up.
His outer wounds healed quickly, but parts of his left brain were damaged beyond repair. Forever altering Gage’s personality. Before the accident, Gage was a foreman known for his good judgment. Railroad work was difficult, the long hours would often boil men’s patience like a kettle. But Gage was known for being levelheaded under pressure, was known as a capable leader who could keep his men in check. But after the accident, Gage developed a mean temper, he could no longer lead his men. Shortly after the accident his boss fired him. Gage spent the rest of his life working odd jobs, scraping to get by, unable to hold down steady work. He began drinking heavily. Getting into fights. His friends said he was no longer the same man. He was no longer Gage.
***
Two weeks later, her and Clint were eating terrible hospital food while watching a terrible late 90s sitcom. Debra sat on the bedside chair. Next to her, a flower-patterned fleece blanket that she had brought from home was folded on the end table with a dog-eared Dan Brown novel splayed on top. Clint sat in the hospital bed which was reclined like a chair. Carefully, as if threading a needle, he brought a spoonful of apple sauce to his mouth.
On the television, a child furtively crawled out of his bed, snuck across his bedroom, then began screeching out a guitar solo on a kid sized Fender Stratocaster. When his pajama clad parents burst from their bedroom and ran down the hallway in search of the noise, Clint began laughing.
During the commercial, still chuckling, Clint asked Debra why they didn’t have children.
Debra’s stomach twisted. She looked down at the limp lettuce in her salad, stabbed a crouton which crumbled underneath her plastic fork. Because you couldn’t tolerate children, she wanted to tell him. Because you despised anything that brought me an ounce of joy. Because with you around, children would have been in danger.
“I’m not sure,” she told him.
“We should,” he said, smiling, carefully scooping more applesauce from his tray. “We should.”
***
A neurologist told Debra a brain was like an Etch A Sketch. Shake it a little and bits of memory tumble away. Shake it hard enough, and you have a blank slate. Clint couldn’t recall what he did for a living or their wedding night. And must have forgotten that he hated onions because he’d order extra whenever the hospital served cheeseburgers. But he did remember his social security number and the name of his first-grade teacher. And although he hadn’t in years, he remembered Debra’s birthday. He surprised her with shrimp scampi from a local Italian place delivered by UberEats, a bottle of champagne, birthday cake, and a box with shiny silver wrapping and a red bow.
“Open it,” Clint said sitting on the hospital bed. He had placed votive candles about the room. Clint’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight as she peeled away the wrapping to reveal a bottle of Tommy Girl perfume.
“Remember our first, what was that called? It was like Valentine’s Day. Now I can’t remember.”
“Sweetest Day,” Debra said.
Debra sprayed the perfume on her wrist. It smelled like a cherry Life Saver, but one that had been left too long on a sun baked dashboard and was now melting. It smelled like being young and carefree. Like racing away to freedom and hitting every green light. Was this a sign? she asked herself. And if it was, was it a sign to leave Clint?
Or a sign to stay with him?
A tear fell down Debra’s cheek. She wiped at it with the back of her hand, again smelling the perfume on her wrist. She buried her head in the crook of her arm and sobbed.
“What’s wrong?” Clint asked. She could hear him moving on the bed. Placing his feet on the floor.
“No,” she said, raising her arm toward him. “It’s okay.”
The two of them stayed like that, Clint motionless, Debra quietly sobbing. Finally, Clint cleared his throat. “I have a question for you,” he said.
“What?” Debra asked, raising her face to meet his.
Clint no longer wore his camo Ford hat but slicked his hair back. For a man his age, he still had a good head of hair; dark, with gray streaks along the temples. His face was healing, the bandage from his head gone, the bruises no longer purple. The corner of his eyes were creased in concentration as he sat there contemplating her.
“It’s a serious question,” he said.
“Okay,” Debra said, wiping her face with the back of her sleeve.
“Why do melons get married in a church?”
Debra glared at him. But Clint looked so sincere, he asked the question in such a deadpan manner, with his hands on the bed, slightly leaning toward her with his lips pursed, that she felt herself softening. Then she laughed. She shook her head. It was all ridiculous, she realized. All of it.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because they cantaloupe.”
***
“Are you pregnant?” her friend at work asked her. Debra was back at work, part-time. The two were in the employee lounge. Debra began coughing, bits of carrot stick flaking the table.
“No,” Debra said, coughing, taking a sip of water from her water tumbler.
Besides filling out the FMLA paperwork, she hadn’t told anyone at work. Figuring that when she left Clint it’d be less complicated.
“Well, you’ve been glowing the last couple of weeks. Either you’re pregnant,” the woman lowered her voice, “or you’ve got a man on the side.”
“No,” Debra said, looking over her shoulder. A dentist walked past the lounge entrance and waved. “It’s not like that at all.”
***
At the hospital Clint went through intense physical therapy. Although it must have been painful, and frustrating, and although she watched him closely as he pulled himself across the parallel bars, working muscles that had grown soft, Debra never once saw his anger rise. Never once saw the rage that would so often bolt across his face like lightning.
Instead, when their eyes met, he’d roll his. He’d shrug his shoulders self deprecatingly. Can you believe this? he’d mouth. No, she’d think to herself, I can’t.
***
After reading an article in Popular Mechanics, Clint decided he wanted to buy a Pruis.
“You?” Debra asked. “Driving a Prius?”
“What?” he asked. “Think of all the money I’d save. And they’re good for the environment.”
***
One night in late January, camped out on the couch at home, wrapped in the sleeping bag, Debra browsed online. She found an article on a UW-Extension office website regarding mallards, the most common type of Wisconsin ducks. It doesn’t happen often, but if for some reason the temperature plummets overnight, the water the ducks are resting on can flash freeze, trapping the ducks while they’re sleeping. When they wake the next morning, they won’t be able to escape.
***
When Clint learned to walk again, he wanted to waltz.
“Dance with me,” he told Debra. A Bluetooth speaker was propped on the window ledge. “Lady in Red” played; a song he forgot he hated.
She couldn’t imagine their bodies touching. And the old him, the man she knew before the accident, didn’t like to be told, No. So, she said, “No.” Testing him, searching his face for anger.
“Okay,” he said, smiling, stretching his arms out and spinning away stiffly, dragging his right foot across the room, “I have two left feet anyway.” Whack! He accidentally slammed his toe against the coffee table. Debra braced herself. Clint stood there, red faced, grimacing in pain. He bent his neck to the side, and Debra caught sight of his scar, faded, as if partially erased, but still visible.
“That hurt worse than that time I fell off that ladder,” he said, reaching for his foot.
“You never fell off a ladder.”
“I probably never told you. But yeah, I fell off a ladder at work. I mean, it was only the first step,” he said smiling, revealing the joke. “But still . . .”
***
At night, alone, sitting with her laptop, she’d think about the past. The first time she visited Clint’s parents’ place soon after they began dating. A small dairy farm with a bright red barn, two concrete silos, cows that chewed grass sleepily in the surrounding green pastures, chickens that pecked about the yard, the place was like something you’d see in a kid’s picture book.
In the shade of the old farmhouse, a few rabbit cages were set up on wooden pallets. Clint pulled a rabbit, feet windmilling in the air, from a cage. The rabbit’s nose twitched in distress, black eyes wild with panic until Clint, with the rabbit in the crook of his arm, gently ran his hand down the length of the rabbit’s body, again, and again, and the rabbit’s breathing calmed, and its black eyes closed.
***
Debra pushed a luggage cart down the hallway. One front wheel stuck sideways; she had to struggle to maneuver the cart around the tight hospital corridors. The security guys at the main entrance, when they saw her, said she could pull up to curbside, let her vehicle idle. She didn’t have to bring her cart all the way across the parking lot.
She declined their offer. Felt herself stalling. Pushing the cart slowly. The last few weeks, each day had felt like an eternity. But now Clint was getting out of the hospital. Was she really going to go home with him? Live in the same house?
Careening around a corner, Debra’s cart bumped over something. She bent down and picked up a stuffed animal; a snowman, his white body now dusty gray, his carrot nose, now limp and sticking out of his face like a tail.
“Oh my gosh,” a woman said.
Debra looked up to see a mother and daughter. The mother wore a winter hat, coat, and boots. Her cheeks were red from being outside. The daughter wore a hospital gown and fuzzy blue slippers. The two of them were holding hands.
“We’ve been looking all over for Anna’s stuffy.” Debra handed the stuffy to the little girl. She looked small for her age, her face withdrawn somehow. Debra’s heart sank, wondering if the girl was sick.
“What do you say?” the woman said.
“Thank you,” the little girl said shyly.
“Of course,” Debra said. Gripping the cart as the woman placed her hand on the girl’s back. Debra tried to catch the mother’s eye. She felt a desperate need suddenly to make sure the girl was all right. That she wasn’t sick, but healthy. That she was okay and would be leaving the hospital soon.
Debra thought of asking but caught herself. The mother thanked her again and the two of them wandered off around the corner.
In the room, her and Clint did one last sweep. Debra made sure she had packed all the toiletries from the bathroom, and that the hospital blankets were folded. Clint walked around with labored, deliberate movements. He crouched down slowly on one knee and looked underneath the bed.
“I guess this is it,” he said, straining to get back up.
Debra crouched to help him. Clint reached up to give her his hand but it looked like a fist swinging toward her face. Flinching, Debra stumbling back.
“I’ll be right back,” Debra said, grabbing her jacket.
Clint was still on one knee, his hand in the air. “Where are you going?” he said, looking at her puzzled.
“I just have to go,” she said, fleeing the room.
Debra walked down the hallway; her hands jammed into her coat pockets. Thoughts tumbled through her mind, and she tried to deflect them as she made her way through the maze-like corridor. She still had the apartment. She could go there, she thought. She didn’t owe Clint anything. Or maybe she could go back and explain everything to him. Maybe he’d understand. Maybe they just needed to talk things through. She didn’t know.
Pushing her way outside, she was startled by the cold, by the wind whipping around her. She pulled the zipper on her coat all the way up, hunched her ears down into her collar while particles of brittle snow landed on her exposed cheeks and burned her skin briefly like sparks. Past her vehicle she saw, through the air agitated with snow, a flash of movement out on the pond. It looked like a duck, she thought, picking up her pace, her feet sliding across the snow slicked pavement.
Past the parking lot, Debra began running, stumbling across the hard uneven grass. Her heart pounded in her chest; her vision pulsed. Out on the ice, the duck flapped its wings wildly, shouted out a desperate honk. Debra pushed past the cattails and ran across the snow-covered ice. The duck honked again, rearing back and flapping harder. Debra heard a loud snap, like the branch of an oak tree cracking in half. The ice was fracturing, she realized, dropping to her knees.
On all fours, her hands pressed against the brittle snow, Debra began moving forward. As she slid across the ice, trying to balance her weight proportionally, a whale-like groan rolled underneath her.
When she reached the duck, the animal reared its head back, its hazel-colored eyes flicking back and forth. The eyes looked strange, alien, but within them she recognized the duck’s panic. She made a shushing sound, and reached toward the duck with cold numbed fingers. The duck flapped its wings furiously, sending an explosion of feathers into the air. Debra folded her hands over the bird’s wings, and, gently as she could, she pulled until the bird was released from the ice.
When she set the bird on the snow, it immediately launched itself into the air. Debra watched breathlessly, marveling as the bird tore through the snow strewn sky and disappeared.
For a long time she continued to watch, kneeling on the ice, searching for a sign of the bird. Searching for any sign at all.
Richie Zaborowske is a multi-genre author, dad, and comedian from the Midwest. He puts a contemporary twist on traditional library offerings; his monthly Short Story Night packs the local brewery and features trivia, comedy, and author interviews. His writing appears in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New World Writing Quarterly, Brevity, JMWW, HAD, Fractured Lit, Cease Cows, Jet Fuel Review, and others.
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