Freshwater Literary Journal 2022

RM Grant Three Scenes in a Hospice i.

Working back, it wasn’t a particularly painful death in truth, you looked a little like light in an old, dusty bulb fading pale and creamy ii.

“I don’t want to have to come visit you in the hospital one day”, she yelled, while he smoked a cigarette.

Her words burned like acid on the young psychonaut’s tongue -want to have toin the end he was forced to swallow every hope of becoming the nothing he knew he was iii. when all of the heat had gone out of you when you had turned soft and cold (a fact your husband remarked upon as the wheels came round to carry you out past the bathroom where my father was hiding his tears from me; out past the dusty hospice window where early evening had come to dress herself) a young nurse turned to your son and said: “sign here, we’d like her eyes. You can keep the heart, we’ve no use for it. No use for dust or bulbs or light or salvaged memories. No use for any of it” 55