Out from homes and across lawns, from behind smooth desks, off of packed shop floors, away from babies and bosses keening, pulled from toilet stalls, post office queues, and out of bed, the women came: A bank of cars double-parked, rallied busy at the flat shore of the hospital's doors, they stood along the pavement in static poses of the worried, the scared. Knuckles, fingers blushed white, wringing handkerchiefs dry. Makeup strewn and fixed and strewn again, and re-fixed. Hemlines tugged, a blouse rejigged, the women came.
As I lay hushed on my bed, these women – to the ward, down the hall to the cool of my room – this was where they moored.
They asked how, what evil, and why, but no doctor could present himself, no nurse appeared. All the equipment seemed in order – the transparent bags of thick fluids, the tubes pinned on skin, the monitor motoring on, scrolling green peaks of pulse – all of this, and yet the hospital held void. The women filled the mint-blue room around my form, hugged the walls, hunched on the tile. They sat, and each in turn pressed a moist rag to my brow, played with the bunched skin of my wrist. And they would sigh, blow a breath, say things like, "I like you very much, do not die. Please."
The women would plead like this, plead with my dying self:
"Please. Don't die, not for anything, just don't."
They would come to profess of their love, eventually, expected. As I lay stunned with fever, lean and naked on a sheet, they would blurt out, "Love, please my love, survive this bad so that we may be happy together forever, in our love for one another."
Sometimes they would mumble a short prayer, blushing, or bite a lip. Often they would kiss my cheek, and I would nod, then, or pull a smile, wink a dried eye.
On one occasion I could only part my lips and tongue a dead tooth, wet-black, out from my mouth. Which they retrieved, of course, one of them, gladly in palm, wearing the withered peg the next day, on a silver chain around their neck; grinning of it, the tooth already softening further, wetter, resting in a shaded patch at their breast. Such was their love.
Such was their love for me, that as my naked body began to bear bruised tumours, dense tan blisters, as my skin tightened, and split, and leaked and opened, and began to mouthe the smooth wrinkled red-brown of muscle beneath it, white strings of tendons shown foraging within my shell, the many women in their droves sat and ate by my side – mostly cold soups – and passed bread and water to my lips from theirs, and went on stroking gently my brow.
They told me, "Do not die, my love. I have a husband, a wife, a boy, but you are all I really am, and your death will make a death of my life. You would make a grave of me if you were to go."
(I would make graves of them all)
I told them, If you must come, wear a nurse's uniform. And so they did.
And so each day, this fleet of errant nurses attended to my bed, bringing with them their bodies wrapped in pressed white linen, hair hidden firm in a bun under cap. A dark rouge grin, eyes dimly powdered, a small blue flower pinned to their lapel. They told me of their world, all about themselves and their lives, but all about my own life, too:
All I had done, all I had still to do.
How well I loved and how much.
How tender, how good, how fierce.
Just how keen or cautious I was.
How much they needed me.
How much they could not live without.
Nights drew in and on, days ballooned through the blinds of my room.
They spoke soft, brightly, as if I were some new knowledge, new language made manifest upon us from some blind part of human thought.
They took my hand, pressed it in both of theirs. Held a wide stare, squeezed. Blinked, looked away from me. Continued on...
As the confessions came, of course, there was inevitably a last: the procession felt the emptying in the air, quietened, whispered, wept, (No more prayers, now, I tried to say) as the nurses left my side shaken, paler, hats and flowers off, now, unfurled in fear, as the women of my life spilled out stumbling onto the outside, a grey street, suddenly struck with all kinds of complex loss, leaning in to walls and a hedge and a passer-by, each of them bearing my child, I died.
No one survived.
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