Folded In
By Jean Marie Hackett
I don’t know what my mother is.
She is dying. But this makes her sound productive, when the producer here is Dying itself; Dying is moving here, while she is not, its force closing in on her like rising water, like walls in an action movie, like an editor’s climb of red lines down a page: Permafrost. First, Dying takes a foot. Then a leg. The ability to walk. Your proper noun and pronoun. Dying goes about its active business, slashing your intestinal tires, tying your vocal cords, calling closing time for your swallows– here comes a feeding tube for your isolated stomach, no longer hearing signals or getting anything but static from buried esophageal pathways: the roads are closed. Into the shredder go your teeth, ones you cannot control, but some primordial force in your dinosaur brain grinds and grinds till you break them, you crack your own grin like an egg. Before that night, you could still smile brightly, if not by mouth, then by blink – in the morse code of life overflowing from the whites of your eyes – in a way you never did before Dying began raking you offline; your feet and fingers could no longer tap dance, but the eyeballs clapped. Oh, Death is fine. It’s the Dying that is not. And there is Dying here— working meticulously, shutting down every department of your corporeal self, slashing each essential line of your prose, reducing your sauce to the residue of a pink eraser rubbed raw, the smudge left behind– a naked poem, is all you are. Ruthless, Dying is, that garage sale you never signed up for, or did you? Under duress you relinquish your colors, they’re arranged in old shoe boxes on your desiccated lawn, the ones in your cheeks long gone, the lightbulbs of your dermis, plumb out, the irises of your eyes, slack, now, under Dying’s press, your hues of life collapsing into an unflinching, monotonic cement. You, folded in like cheese: This is how it is done. But not by you. You could not “do.” You could not “is” anything if you tried; Dying grabbed all your “tries” anyway and hauled them off to goodwill. Nothing lively left, nothing except– Dying, doing things to you, you exist only to get done to, it marches through your aching story, the one you loaded with fluffy Facebooked phrases, Christmas trees and gossipy complaints and worries–
And it –
cuts,
cuts,
cuts,
bushwhacking through every grassy line of life, cleaving cellular membranes, till like a dam unleashed your meager smudge spills from ripped seams, a hollowed hunk of glacier calving into the ocean in slow motion, suspended in still frame, as Dying presses pause:
This will take years.
Limb by limb, consumed by a climate changing. It’s not a question of tense. It’s a question of subject. What’s left of you, quarantined in ever-winnowing parentheses, lost at the bottom of your own well, twenty-one grams of a soul, but eyeballs though, for the moment, that focus long enough to convey, with technology, “my glasses” when someone opens an album of photographs; it’s a gesture, without gesticulation, one you’d made countless times before: you, wanting to look closer, you, wanting to speak, you, wanting to express, you wanting to take part in conversation, even if just for gossip, what was that? you’d say, to hear it again, the way you once looked closely enough at a sewing machine needle and thread wound round a bobbin to create kids’ Halloween costumes. Oh, some something of you is in there, but what is it, what does it see? – and who are you, what are you, when there is so little left of you to “is” “or “do” –
There is only Dying, marking you.
THE END
Author Bio: Jean Marie is a former lawyer turned yoga teacher in Park City, Utah. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Bennington.