2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

mistaken, that this had all been a misunderstanding. I wanted to offer
him my last cigarette.
“Usually, they’re much younger, fitter.” The husband eyed me and I
sucked in my gut. I stared at a hole in my shoe. “They’ve usually got
their shit together.”
“I should probably go,” I said, but I only sunk my hands into my
pockets, as if tethered to the unconscious woman who had bled onto me
from her nose.
“Did she even tell you about the tumor”
I peered back through the sliding doors, at the pale man sitting in
the waiting room, his hand swaddled with a towel soaked in red.
“She used to at least use that as the excuse,” the husband said. His
hands were white. “At least disclosed that much to the other boys she
found.”
Looking at the blue veins etched along his nose, I wanted to ask him
about her, if she liked to knit or paint or shoot guns, if she slept with her
socks on, if she was someone’s mother. The husband fussed with his mustache
and I wanted to ask him the world.
The doors behind us parted and a portly nurse emerged. The future
trembled in the lines of her face. “She’s awake,” the nurse said. “She’s
asked for the man she loves.”
Santa Fe Literary Review 111