The Opiate, Summer Vol. 14
Serenade of the Lobsters Lily Kip
I
n the evenings the sky through the French doors looks like a bruise. The clouds go all yellow and green and pink and purple and I think I see the blood pulsing underneath—I think I see the vessels popping under the skin. If I stand in the right place in our kitchen, I can watch the street through the windows. The neighborhood is all twilight. Fuzzy houses, fuzzy lights, fuzzy cars buzzing past in the glow. After the first stroke, George was quieter. I did not mind the silence so much; after thirty something years there is not much we haven’t heard from each other. We spent a lot of time reading side by side. Or I would knit and he would do crosswords, or he would watch the news and I would fold laundry. Parallel play. He has been more fragile since the second stroke. He is tired. He does not have energy to putter
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around like he used to, going to work or mowing the lawn or reading in his study. But his voice has returned, he’s talkative, he likes to ask me questions. He knows he is forgetting things. I think he fears losing everything completely. “What’s that show we used to like?” He is sitting in the armchair in front of the television. The leather cushions are faded, some parts are flaking off— there is a George-sized impression left when he stands. Once, when the children were little, we found a baby bird in the driveway. He was pink and soft, yet without feathers. He had fallen from his nest. Beatrice cried and we put him in a Tupperware container with a dishcloth. The next morning I came into the kitchen to find him dead, just where we had left him. I buried him in the yard while George and the children were asleep,
