"BOWL VISION"
copyright 2006 by MARGE SIMON
Messages
With crayon in fist, little Agnes plugs in the number on the envelope face like an address. 80.
"I know how to spell eighty," she announces while her auntie tucks in the get-well note that Agnes has articulated with dolphins leaping through moonbeams. "A and T. A-T."
"You're so smart." Her auntie hands Agnes an orca sticker to affix like a postage stamp.
"A-T! A-T!" Agnes cheers; the card for Mother is ready.
The whale song piped into the room makes him sleepy. Tuck, Agnes's father, meditates on the number eighty in the solace room at the CCU—in numerical equations, foreign languages, pop songs from that decade. It's the number his wife's BP must rise to for her to have a chance.
Later, walking the dim hall made darker by Seattle's low sky at rainy dusk, Tuck wants to ask the attending nurse, "Anything?" but she anticipates him, checks her watch: "Not yet."
In Texas, under a bright sky with a two-hour advantage on night, a woman burning cedar and sage prays for a stranger, tracing figure eights in the ash left behind at the altar.
Later, preparing to retire for the night, she glimpses a snake wriggling out the back door she'd cracked for her in-and-out cat, Luna. It glides casually in a path that forms eights. When it leaves, Luna pads in, unperturbed.
The woman dreams she sits in a well's bottom. Flute music massages echoes into the walls in low blue tones like whale's voices. A sky of lavender illuminates everything.
Tuck awakens at the hospital to whale song, cinnamon twists and coffee. He phones to check on Agnes and his sister.
"Any changes?" she asks.
"I dunno," he swallows a piece of doughnut. "Just woke up. How's my little wiggler?"
Agnes answers the question for them both, playing a one-girl band of spin drum, ankle-wrapped jingle bell and kazoo. "A-T! A-T-A!" she choruses in whale-and-moon pajamas.
"Any improvement?"
Morning tints pale light into his wife's room. The window is cracked an inch. Tuck steps over cords snaked across the floor. He notices that someone has changed the music in her room to the single clear tones of a flute.
"Her kidneys have started functioning slightly." The attending nurse adjusts a machine. "We've reduced oxygen. She's breathing better. Pulse has normalized." She takes notes.
"How's her BP?"
The nurse squints at the monitor, then her eyes widen. "Eighty-eight."
"What?"
"It was sixty only..." The nurse consults the tape. "Yep. Eighty-eight."
They smile at each other, the scent of cedar outside bringing the end of morning with it.
Copyright 2006 by Tamara Kaye Sellman
